you cindy and i again now welcome to all of you for attending this and i think we all have a great interest in finding out what is public banking and what can the city of seattle do to maybe promulgated this idea that may be  benefit for those of us who are residents of seattle so i think we're in for a very exciting evening we have a very distinguished very knowledgeable panel here that i'd like to introduce but before i do that because the concept of public banking did not just start out here as far as in state of washington we have someone here that i'd like to maybe say a few words before we start with a panel and that's senator bob  state senator bob boy kind of got this thing going a few years ago and so i'd like him to say it give us a little background thank you wayne and to our distinguished panel you know i am just so the decided about this because you see this snowball rolling and the people are starting to get it this is been a project that has been in the works for me personally since the main banking crash in two thousand and eight but even before that you always have heard about the bank of north dakota and have said why don't we do with something like that here i mean it just makes all the sense in the world so you all know i magine you're here because you know what public public banking is all about so i won't go through any of that but i would like to go into some of the straits that the state is in right now you know we just passed well we have been unable to pass a transportation budget in the senate for two years now and you can see the infrastructure literally starting to crumble around us the inadequacy of it all  our debt ceiling limiting our capability to be able to do anything meaningful to try and transform our infrastructure slip we can actually have economic development here let alone that complicated by the fact that we just passed the voters just passed initiative thirteen fifty one which cuts class sizes and half which means we need to double classroom space or unless you want to double up teachers in a single classroom but i don't know how much good that's going to do so we have all of these pressing needs you know as the legislature has rated the public works the system defunded it and diverted the revenue streams that feed the public course assistance which is what local governments rely on for dependable low interest loans so that they can build safe water systems and sewer systems and some ancillary road projects and that sort of thing so we have huge needs infrastructure needs in our state but we also have huge economic development needs we've got small businesses who are having problems with access to credit because big banks don't pay attention to the needs of small businesses they could care less from wall street what's going on here in washington state so those kinds of needs all powell up to the fact that there is a better way we can use taxpayers dollars for the benefit of the taxpayers of washington state that's the whole goal is martin use of public funds and build our capacity so that you know a public bank isn't necessarily a panacea that's going to fix all of our problems overnight but our children and our grandchildren if you follow put a grandpa said you put a penny in the piggy bank every day for the next fifty years imagine the resources that our grandchildren can have to build th type of society we all want them to have that's the goal not necessarily short sighted gains you know windfalls or whatever is building for the future our generation while they're saying now that they will be the first generation that will be less educated than the previous generation in the history of mankind that we need to leave them something a legacy so that they can build that world that we all want them to have this is a serious attempt to move that direction i'm so tickled to have our great guests here and experts especially dr carl bell who is from germany who is going to be speaking about their system but i was just fascinated to hear it's different than how i imagined it so i really appreciated the conversation but hopefully you'll get something out of his descriptions of what's going on about public baking so anyway i've talking to what you get for asking a politician to speak so i'm going to turn it over to our distinguished panel and say solidarity let's move our country forward so member like cotton like to kind of have you get started and tell us a little bit about what you're seeing or why you are even interested in this idea of public banking for the city of seattle thank you very much and now an expert i just want you a little background on why i felt this important issue and why i've worked with citizens and putting together the forum we have this evening and also we had on work we had a review before my finance committee this afternoon which assist them in providing greater housing in seattle in fact it came out at that meeting that when you look at the overall costs of borrowing it could be as high as three quarters of the total costs of of long term costs of putting up buildings for housing so if we could tap into a mechanism that could see the need to lower those costs we could produce more low income housing and then tomorrow will be meeting w people from the business community particularly small businesses to answer their questions or explain how a public bank may work and also point out how other communities are very interested in assisting their small businesses regarding getting better access to credit i was able to attend a conference held in santa fe several months ago that was actually sponsored by part forms was what's go forward and see we can do to create a public bank that really resonated with the public and in particular the chamber there and so he received a lot of support from the business community  i have noted that whenever the term public pain comes up reporters perk up their ears people are really interested in this topic there's something about it i think that really captures the imagination of people thinking that as senator how cigar pointed out we could actually use public funds most directly to help people in the community as opposed to taking those public bonds and invest them  stocks or bonds or something that goes into the larger basically financial industry that's far off and many ways are responsive to communities in many ways in fact irresponsible as we've seen in the recent recession objectives they find something else that they could object to in it but we are not alone in this quest vermont in fact did a fuse abilities study for public banking  city of santa fe literally last month approved putting aside money the city council did mare to do a public banking fiscal impact study there are people in philadelphia pennsylvania who are trying to persuade their city government to do something so there are cities around the country that are recognizing that you're not going to receive help from austria they're not to receive help from chase manhattan and bank of america and that we have our own resources yours are away of organizing our own resources to make better use of it and assist those who are either in businesses or individuals trying to protect or trying to save their homes there ar have found it all in but this is there's not any one particular model this multiple models and i think that's what i encourage you to as the speakers do their presentation and think about what they have to say think of questions that you members that this is a worthy objective to investigate and to pursue and if i can succeed in that then we can take the next step down the road and in ending i also want to once again wait he's got some information and if you need to receive any additional information he can provide you assistance thank you very much for being here today health thank you very much so when we were talking about the panel earlier i offered and was nominated trying to do a little bit of historical context about the  larger context in which the discussion about public banking and you know spanking is taking place just a brief word about my own history is that i've lived in san francisco for quite some time and i first remember hearing about this idea i think back in around two thousand and i thought it was a very fascinating idea and i would talk to people about it and there always seemed to be people would raise these you know you can't really do it because of this or you can't really do it because of that and it never really want anywhere there was a may or all race in two thousand three and there was a green party candidate going solace who actually introduced public banking into his platform and so that's when it resurface and then the history of it of cisco is that sort of neck his counterpart in san francisco john avalos had some hearings before the board and kind of broached the idea and then he sent a letter to the city attorney saying can we do this in the city attorney sent a letter back saying no you can't do it because of constitutional issues and that's kind of when i was brought in because they showed me the letter and it was clear that regardless i didn't know all of the legal issues like i know them now but it was clear that the grounds they were citing that you couldn't do this it was it was a very perfunctory blow off with a letter that they had sent so we let a push back and got a reconsideration very good research they finally did on this and they determined that in california charter city powers would allow cities or counties to establish banks and one of the reasons i'm saying this is that you might also heard this issue of constitutionality that there may be legal obstacles and i think that that's really not  a solid argument i think that there is actually the basis within stablished president in washington state to seriously consider this issue so i think it's a public policy initiative that can actually be very seriously broached so the question that again i'm going to just try and say a few words about is kind of the larger context kind of a historical context why all of a sudden is public banking on the radar screen why do we talk about it now and what would be potentially its larger implications to kind of follow some of what nick was saying i think that for me a way to think about this is if we look at there's been kind of a long history of development in the u s and glow but the us has kind of been the leader of what is may have heard this term neo liberalism right but this idea of the attack on the government the attack on the public sector the attack on the legitimacy invalidity of public sector interventions public programs social welfare systems and this really goes back to in some sense politically at an urban level the  nineteenth seventy s and that you know the defending of hud and there was there was a process that was started that began to take a lot of federal money that used to flow to cities to address some of these problems like affordable housing infrastructure development there were a lot of problems with those federal programs i don't think we should necessarily romanticize the world that was prior to ronald reagan but there were certain things about the there was a generally richard nixon said in  seventy two we're all keynesians now so even richard nixon was economically to the left of where democratic presidential candidates generally line up today so there's definitely been this this major shift in there were a series of so there was there was the defining of there was the election of reagan and one of the main ways reagan builders electoral coalition was an attack on urban social welfare programs so he face began to further defund hud he transformed the housing allocations that came through the f h a moved to section eight so there was there was this general shift about it towards attacking urban programs attacking federal programs that were giving money to cities and that was a very important part of his the way he built his his electoral coalition and the shift towards to the right towards a more conservative economic climate and what eventually became known as quote n liberalism and under reagan you also had moves towards financial deregulation so there was the one nine hundred eighty and one hundred eighty two the deregulation of the savings and loans there were other things there are a lot more you know kind of technical and complicated and there are also things that began to happen under alan greenspan that are less well known but really laid the basis for what eventually led to the repeal of glass steagall so greenspan began to essentially loosen a lot of the regulatory requirements that the fed  supposedly imposing on commercial banks and began to allow commercial banks in the u s to do a lot of things that they hadn't been allowed to do before that so there was this financial deregulation at the same time that there's been this this major cut in federal aid to the cities and then this is also taking place in the context of growing globalization in the internationalization of markets so what this is meant for cities like seattle san francisco and in a very different way detroit is the lack in the former sources of funds that they need they becoming complete more and more dependent on private capital markets and more and more dependent on promoting policies to attract private investment so the term that's often used as a kind of an urban entrepreneurial ism that you need to kind of promote development by giving developers concessions public private partnerships subsidies tax breaks to attract capital  that's that's the name of the game and if you're if you're a city like seattle perhaps or salmon cisco san francisco's been one of the best cities in the us in terms of attaching a lot of conditionalities to public private partnerships because it's such a hot market the private property developers to get into that market are willing to do things like certain affordable housing allocation and those types of things seattle i think has a more progressive regime than a lot of cities at the other end of the spectrum you have the midwestern cities or a place like to troy right that has undergone massive the industrialization and there's been i mean the idea that the federal government is going to seriously step in and assist detroit is just it just hasn't been part of the equation so the point kind of the larger the larger point of this is that there's been and then of course the financial this deal regulation of benchley led to the banks and the financial markets destroying themselves and it was clear to anyone who was paying attention that it was in fact public sector intervention and central bank that actually kept it was the keynesian mechanisms that still exist that prevented wholesale absolutely catastrophic collapse that probably would be greater than the worse in the great depression had those mechanisms not been there so i think it's kind of this combination of things so that we don't have the kind of federal aid we don't have the kind of federal programs that could support alternatives right that's it used to be thirty years ago people who were looking for an alternative in the city often it was organizing around trying to transform federal government policy get more money in and there were problems with it again but that was the context in which people often became our now for better or worse we don't have that readily available option and more and more cities are becoming snarled in these these financial networks that have  in some sense really constrained the options so i think that one way to think about public banking in kind of a larger sense is that it's reasserting to me one of the things that's inspiring about it i would say that in a personal way part of the reason i'm invested in this work is it's pushing back against this whole thirty year wave of privatization and the devaluation of the public sector it's actually saying no we're actually deregulated the financial markets  you drove us all off the cliff you've been bailed out by the public sector and you're acting with total impunity you're taking more wealth you're just doing pretty much the same thing so it's it's fighting back against that whole wave privatization  that we've encountered it's reasserting a positive value for the public sector but it's also doing so in a way that provides very practical solutions to some of the problems that have been created by this very regime kind of finance development so seattle i think you are like san francisco in the sense that it's a relatively wealthy city relative to other u s cities but you have tremendous problems around affordable housing for instance and you know people have to borrow money now they don't have the federal aid that used to be so cities have to go to the bond market and borrow to finance that how could a municipal bank begin to take some of that activity back inside the city so rather than paying billions of dollars literally billions of dollars to outside bondholders who are generally the same people who own the banks rather than paying that money out you could bring it back into the city and then begin to fund things that you wan fund or extending banking services to be unbanked and that's been another huge problem with the financial system is its predatory character the whole subprime lending crisis so to me we could talk more about some of the specifics of how bank would work but i i wanted to emphasize more those larger historical context and wise think this is this is the in some sense the moment where this is coming on the public agenda or could come on the public agenda in a much more serious way even though there are a lot of problems but ten years ago i'm proud of the financial crisis i just i think it didn't have the same traction so we can talk more about specific the thanks i've been doing a lot of work both over the last month looking at specificities of seattle i've done a lot of work in california also new york about how banks can work and what their options are how you could fund them those types of things  thank you very much dr title so our next speaker is thomas dr title is currently director of the financial market relations department of the german savings bank association he studied  business economics with an emphasis on banking management at the university of homburg completed his doctorate at the european business school at her strict think oh and currently he's a member of several boards of directors and advisory committees  size german businesses he has extensive experience in the field of international banking and traveling worldwide to discuss with government officials the advantages and to put the billet of the german savings bank system to other national state banks and corporate speak bangs may have famous names and international reputation but in fact it is a decent generally organized banking  enterprise's since two thousand and eight i was on set of the financial crisis saving banks have issued an increasing amount of new loans tranter prices in two thousand hundred sixty eight million u s dollars and most of the four hundred sixteen saving banks have totaled as said so far and one point three billion dollars each of the saving banks is an independent credit institution forty liable for its management decisions and deeply ordered into its reachin of operation if you stand in a market  for this reason saving bank always look for long term solutions in the form of long term customer relationships conservative management and long term predictable financing solutions not to burden but to music of small or medium sized town such as it civil and think it's obviously this money could be saved if one were based in the cayman  society which is a doom in for principle ways to promote savings so which is saving banks have brought days of saving deposits they provide a supply of credit to all sections of  popular asian which is known as financial inclusion they provide a supply of credit to small and medium sized businesses which is one of the saving banks quote businesses and for us say participating businesses saving bank customers have no need is not permitted many things for your attention write i'm not only batting cleanup but i'm also doing intro to public banking one hundred one i'm assuming that you're all here because you know something about public banking but it's an interesting field of study as i'm sure you're discovering because even the two words put together elicit all sorts of responses i was once called a communist and a socialist before breakfast one morning at a rotary club meeting for just using those two words in the same sentence and of course you know the the left loves the word public the right loves the word bank and also hates the adverse so it's an interesting mix of people that are brought to this movement from various political backgrounds and one of the things we're working on that public banking institute is pulling them all together everybody from the tea party to occupy to talk about this in the lead up for the next elections because we think it's a really important issue whose time has come so what is public banking now the first slide here i made for vermont obviously where we've done a lot of work on public banking and this shows the way the banking system works municipalities now they basically take their tax receipts the money you all pay in taxes and parking fines in the intergovernmental transfers from the federal government and they put it in a bank and then  municipalities need money for their own lending because municipalities all over the country do lending when i was in vermont i ran the community development lending institution in month pil year and made loans to businesses and homeowners they have to borrow it back from wall street so we send our money to wall street to put on deposit and then we borrow it back at interest when we need it that's how the system works right now public banking tries to short circuit that process by using the money we would otherwise have on deposit for our own needs and to promote our economy in the local community now what is the difference between a public bank and a private  again this is public banking one on one while private banks missions are a return on investment for their shareholders that their business they're in it to make a profit there's nothing wrong with that but that's what they were set up to do they also want to maximize profit minimize risk and make loans in investments that actually are repaid they manage for all sorts of risks if you talk to a typical banker they won't really recognise that they create money out of nothing even though the banking system as a whole does that because individual bankers are so busy managing the risks of banking which include liquidity risks and interest rate risks and default risks and all these things that make our head spin frankly that they don't really see what they're doing when they're creating credit is putting new money in the system but that's exactly what they're doing and that credit creation function is what we're talking about when we're talking about creating  municipal public bank for the city of seattle now public bank's mission is actually quite different they're out to do economic development to build housing to provide jobs if you want to get into student loans like the bank of north dakota does and make loans more accessible and less and more forgiving for the student population that's another thing you can do they also build public infrastructure public transit roads bridges hospitals schools that's public banks mission now the deposits that private banks get come from all of us individuals businesses governments deposits are insured by the f b i see up to two hundred fifty thousand dollars over two hundred fifty thousand dollars and this is an important point because you can believe that the city of seattle's deposits are greater than two hundred fifty thousand dollars and in vermont little vermont our average daily balance for the state is three hundred fifty million dollars now that's orders of magnitude bigger than what the f d a i see insurers and and this is an important factor for public banks banks have to put up collateral to insure those deposits they have to put up capital and that means that your local community state chartered banks typically are nowhere big enough to take your public deposits and so all across the country public deposits by and large go to the banks that are too big to fail because they're big enough to capitalize those deposits and that means that your public deposits your taxpayer deposits are going to wells fargo here in seattle or to bank of america in our case in the state of vermont it goes to t d bank north now t d stands for toronto dominion it's a canadian bank largely invested in the keystone x l pipeline which is something that most vermonters don't appreciate so where in the business of trying to up divest from fossil fuels and the public banking movement in vermont is certainly part of that so public bank deposits the kind of public banks we're talking about here in the city of seattle and the public banking institute talks about by and large accept deposits from the governments not from individuals and businesses so much as they do in germany that could be a long term vision for banks but i think if you're really interested in getting a public bank set up here in seattle you shouldn't be competing with your local community banks and credit unions which you will be doing if you start accepting those deposits you need them measure allies in the initial phase of getting a public bank up and growing over time maybe they could accept these type of deposits but that's a whole nother realm of work public banks in this country and north dakota in particular are more like wholesale banks than they are retail banks and that's an important distinction as well they also are going to be required to comply with all the regulatory requirements to ensure those deposits with capital and to make sure that they stay safe and sound after all these are your tax dollars you want to make sure that they're managed properly so private banks lend to individuals businesses governments the usual range of lending and they are an interest on those loans to pay the interest on their deposits that's the basic banking model public banks also make loans but they do it in the way we're talking about in a more wholesale way so in north dakota the bank of north dakota partners with the local banks and the local banks to the retail end the bank the state bank provides extra funding extra capital makes it possible for the local banks to make longer term loans lower interest loans loans to sectors that maybe are underserved by the banking community like in north dakota if you've got a start  business you can pretty easily get a loan of two twenty five thousand dollars to get that business off the ground that's actually hard to do in the market in the banking market and of course they earn interest on the lending to pay the interest on the deposits that you make as a public entity in the bank and to provide a revenue stream for the public entity so this is another way to raise revenue for the other priorities that you have in the city besides taxing or cutting programs which are the two choices were given these days by our leaders a lot of the time so the public banking system is basically a loop it starts with you the taxpayers you pay out in your taxes in your parking fines that goes into the public bank the public bank deposits those things on deposit this isn't like another allocation our program and then uses that money for lending that produces a return that comes back to the taxpayer it's a closed loop really and it short circuits all of the money that you're bleeding out of your local economy into the larger banks and other places now this question of all the money that you're bleeding out of your economy into the larger banks and other places is an important question because all of the financial fees and interest that we pay on other things is like a hidden tax on everything we do counselor look out i mentioned this this is some research that my colleague mark kennedy from germany did looking at how much of everything we do is accounted for by this interest tax public housing you can see down here the cost of interest on capital can be as much as seventy seven percent of the cost of public housing so we're paying that in interest to the banks to build low income housing if we didn't pay that interest out of the system and made more low income housing we might not have the tent cities that we're seeing with homelessness around our communities now since that crash in two thousand and eight drinking water the cost of interest on capital thirty eight percent garbage collection it's not such a capital intensive enterprise apparently it's only about ten percent at least in her research this also spreads to other consumer goods that we buy about forty percent of everything you buy is a tax to the financial sector now with the kind of burgeoning interest and debt payments that are made in our monetary system now a study was done a few years ago here in washington state to see what the economic impact would be of a state bank here and by re allocating these interest payments internally here in washington state you could increase the small business loans about eight point two percent and create over eight thousand jobs for the state so it has a genuine benefit in economic impact to do this as well in vermont we did a study last year of the economic impact in feasibility of a state bank in vermont and we found that over twenty five hundred jobs would be created and over three hundred  forty million would be added to the gross state product now if we could count on legislatures to actually use data to make decisions this would be a no brainer wouldn't it over twenty five hundred jobs that's over fifteen percent  unemployment rate that's a significant impact we're a little state and we do have unemployment i'm sure you do too it's a good thing to create jobs but unfortunately the banking lobby in vermont is a very powerful thing and they've managed to stop this in its tracks now on a number of occasions we tried to get the legislature to pay for the study and the banking lobby stopped that and so then last year when we filed legislation on the basis of the study to just take ten percent of the treasure average daily balance put it in the vermont economic development authority which is already making the loans that we're talking about a state bank making and using that money to start a public bank on the basis of the vermont economic development authority and the other lending agencies that we have in vermont will the banks stop that too for the most part except one thing i realized was that the banking lobby couldn't make it out to every city and town in vermont and we have a very important ritual every spring known as town meeting where all the citizens from all the towns get together and decide on their town budgets and that's also a really popular time to vote on other things you might remember back in the eighty's how the new england town meetings voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament for example and and so i thought well let's get the town meetings to vote on public thinking and i started a town meeting campaign we got nineteen towns to vote to direct the legislature to set up a public bank which is a lot of towns actually taking a stand like that the banking lobby didn't manage to show up there and convince them otherwise and so they didn't give a banking license but they did pass a bill that made the state treasurer transfer ten percent of our average daily deposits in to be to for local lending so right now in vermont we actually are starting the process of taking our state funds and using it in vermont for vermonters which is good news for public banking because we are making some progress there thank you now public banks may be new in the united states but as you've heard from germany they're not new in the world over forty percent of the world runs on public banks radical fringe countries like germany and costa rica and taiwan and you know this is not a new thing and  it's actually a fairly common form of public finance so it's not so difficult to do it's not an untested method it's just something that somehow the banking system has managed to stop from from doing here except in north dakota now in north dakota back in one thousand nineteen a long time ago the nonpartizan leak like our new nonpartisan initiative got together and got a state bank established the same year they did that they actually also established a state grain elevator so north dakota one of the redder states bluer states i can never remember is actually the home of the only state owned grain elevator and the state owned bank and they had an enormous success with the bank but it didn't start right off that way right off the banks took them all the way to the supreme court and tried to overturn the legislation that set it up and they lost but people say well north dakota is such a successful bank because of all the oil and gas revenues there and that's not actually true you can see from this chart i know you can't read it but the blue at the bottom is the part of the north dakota portfolio that represents the agricultural lending they do the green is the residential lending the yellow which is actually the biggest part is the student lending and then the red is the commercial lending so the revenues that the north dakota bank are transferring back into the general fund of north dakota which by the way have been over three hundred million dollars in the last ten years north dakota has actually taken a vote they were debating whether to get rid of the property tax because of the revenues the dividends from their public bank  nice debate to have is that from oil and gas in fact even in the commercial portfolio not a lot of their lending comes from that sector there was a pipe company in there that we found in a few other things but it's not as if this is because solely of the oil and gas industry in north dakota and the other thing about north dakota that's interesting is that their local banks are very healthy not a single one failed after two thousand and eight  single one and they haven't been bought up by the big banks either they still have local community banks that still serve their local community with local community leaders on them here's a chart that shows north dakota south dakota montana and wyoming notice that there are other oil and gas states represented there north dakota still has about sixteen banks per hundred thousand population whereas nationwide the very last one over there is about four you know and that's because they've been consolidated into these ever increasing large banks the other thing to note of course about the oil and gas industry related to north dakota is that there are many states that have that industry but not the states themselves aren't running in the black whereas north dakota is as a state and that's another important lesson for seattle right because if you're worried about revenues and you get into public banking eventual ie not immediately just like your leaders have said this doesn't happen overnight it happens over a relatively long period of time the banking activities that you have in the city will help fund the city services as a revenue stream just like the banks make a profit on their lending their revenue stream as well allows the public bank to do what we call counter cyclical lending banking typically is very pro cyclical so you the economy crashes because they've made a few too many subprime loans and they pull back credit to all of the businesses in the area but you can see here the blue up on the top here is the north dakota bank and after two thousand and eight which is sort of on the right hand side of the chart you see their lending went up so they do counter cyclical lending and increase lending into their commercial sector during economic downturns to try and help keep their economy growing that's more possible if you have a public bank and just one last moment about what's going on in the banking world in general and why it's so important to start to recapture some of our monetary functions in general we've gone from the gold standard to the debt standard and the debt standard drives the growth imperative it drives environmental destruction it drives wealth concentration and human impoverishment that's just a fact of how the system works the one percent that people were objecting to so strongly and articulately a few years ago is a function of this system it's not a function of human greed i would argue that human greed is a side effect of a system that we've constructed completely wrong most of the human beings i know are not inherently greedy but the system has been built in correctly people who are working in the system don't even really understand how it works they just work in it it's their job so demonizing people making people look like they are bad actors when really we are all human beings just trying to make a living in a system that's badly tilted toward concentration of wealth and ever increasing debt and money chasing more debt these are real figures of both the us money supply and the national debt from the eight hundred to the present they mirror each other and so that's another reason to bring about public banking because the interest payment on all that debt is what consolidates wealth in fewer and fewer hands and consolidates power in fewer fewer hands so we can start short circuit that process as well by taking matters back in our own hands and instituting public banks on every level we possibly can thank you involved in this process you know after the c p thank you and the next steps are going to be small steps but there will also be very very clear steps  my intent is through these forums in the one who have tomorrow in the workshop is to educate the city council and also those members of the executive the mayor's office that this is a wild pursuit of looking at how we can go about establishing a public there are hurdles the biggest hurdle actually is not necessarily more with think the big banks that want don't want us to exist it's the the legal system that many of the people who are by and councils to the city  believe that and who have experience with as attorneys in court cases but with the state constitution does not allow the city to establish a public bank and also the limitations on the state legislature in the washes state code so it's a sort of interesting battle and one here and i think that the council members are sympathetic to everything that the now outlined here as far as what the objectives are i think that the hurdle is a sense that we can still pursue this and deal with each one of those structural problems as they come about you know i recently was was reading a book by edmund morris on theodore roosevelt and was very interesting to see how and he was faced with the major challenges in trying to curtail the conglomerates that during when he was president he was told the the laws just in allow for him in the federal government to curtail the powers of the monopolies and he said will still pursue it because it's the right thing to do it's the thing to do to help the public and i think it's the power of persuasion to give the politicians the courage to be innovative  forward and to tackle each of these challenges that we face systematically there are there have been research that has been research dog allston some of the center has cigars done some as well that show that each of these challenges can be overcome but it will take hard work and or take i think a recognition by the elected officials that the public see this as a valuable course to undertake so all my advice to you is that if you believe that this is a worthwhile course and again keeping open that is different models even amongst presentations today i would encourage you we all these days have access to email let the council members know and the mayor's office that you  that the city should begin the pursuit of investigating a public take that message will allow me to then  convince them to put money aside as was done in cellophane it was done in vermont to begin to take the next step which is studying the possibility and once we begin net then we are i think down a road that can actually produce results because then we'll be able to establish a formal dialogue these things may take some time i don't think we'll work accomplish it overnight but if we don't begin going down that path then we'll never take that journey so it's my feeling that there's a nuff momentum now in the city to at least begin a serious discussion certainly i'll do my part but it really helps if  the other members of the council begin to see this is something other than a little cart of ideas being tossed out there so that's my suggestion well with the next step should be thank you thank you and thank