... it's an arms race in city government. And, um, I think we have to have a brave few who stand up and say, you know, "Hey, we don't have to do that," or, "We have toBetter educate our politicians that they're not actually making money on those deals, and sometimes saying no is, is better than saying yes. Um, so it, it's just, it's really tough. I mean, and, and look, I, I-- you know, Chad, you can put a dollar on the, in, in the jar when I say this, but I say this from the standpoint of my dad's a developer. I grew up in development. My family is dependent on development. Um, and you know, it is, it is a different mentality from the development side than it is from the city side. But I, I'm just saying generally developers are gonna push because capitalism tells them to push to make their deal as profitable as possible, and if that can get them an injection of additional city funds, I, I think it would be tremendous. And I think if a region would learn with specific types of development, 'cause there are... You know, it's, it's, it's super broad, and it's, it's hard to... I, I don't wanna paint it with just one big brush, uh, because I think industrial manufacturing, employment, um, corporate relocations, things like that, that's a whole different ball of wax. Uh, and, and it's, it's something just... It, it, it really has its own, uh, math equation separate from, like, retail and power center development. Um, and, and, and so I, I wanna be very careful that I'm not, I'm not trying to paint everything at the same time. But it would be nice to see, like, regionally if some cities would step up and say, "You know what? We're gonna be more conservative and a lot tighter in incentivizing retail." And I would go even further to say where we should be doing it is retail that may not be there by the time the incentive runs out, right? In, in soft goods retail, things that are sold on Amazon, things that have gone online. I mean, I, I, I have this funny conversation with my wife about once a month where she talks about all of the-- And I'm talking about my wife and shopping twice on the same podcast. But, um, where she talks about all of her favorite stores that have gone out of business that month, right? Um, and I, I just, I think at the end of the day, we've gotta be smarter as cities, and it's hard to do that individually. We actually have to do that a little bit more corporately, uh, and, and maybe through, like, associations and organizations, we have to have those conversations and, and push that education, uh, point of view, uh, to council members. The Strong Towns movement has done that, don't get me wrong, but there are still, there are still some political things with the Strong Towns movement that folks are not gonna agree with. The one thing I will say, though, is that we've gotta be a little bit more incremental in our approach. I mean, I, I would 100% agree with that. We need to be smarter in the overall equation of where we put our city funds and where we don't put our city funds. Um, and we've gotta get away from, from the glory side of development. It's really great to get the glory, don't get me wrong. My name's been in the paper. I've cut the ribbons. I understand what it feels like. But ultimately, if you're cutting a ribbon on something that's going to be detrimental to the finances of your city 10 years down the road, why? Let's just, let's just be a little better and a little smarter at what we're doing.
