Richard C. MacDonald interview, September 20, 2016: transcript

i AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD C. MACDONALD An Oral History Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2016 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editor: Stefani Evans Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Project Manager: Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the university for the support given that allowed an idea and the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv PREFACE Henderson developer and Philadelphia native Richard MacDonald is a natural storyteller, and he has stories to tell. The man behind MacDonald Highlands and the Dragon Ridge Country Club first moved to Las Vegas as a young teen with his parents in 1959. After graduating Las Vegas High School in 1963, his parents moved to Hawaii and he enrolled at Nevada Southern University (now UNLV) and supported himself in Las Vegas by selling unfinished houses. His parents convinced him to move to Hawaii, where he attended the University of Hawaii worked with his father selling blocks of pre-developed cemetery lots to Asian buyers. In this interview, MacDonald describes his experience as a white man facing racial discrimination, of Las Vegas as Hawaii's Ninth Island, of earning his real estate broker's license, and of his father's plan to develop and sell Las Vegas property to Hawaiians. Returning to Las Vegas, MacDonald worked with Frank Sala and Chuck Ruthe to obtain his first two sections of Henderson land, which became Sun City MacDonald Ranch and the western part of MacDonald Highlands. He talks of developing Sunridge at MacDonald Ranch on Eastern Avenue and The Canyons at MacDonald Ranch. v He also speaks to local prejudice against Hawaiians and to the way the City of Henderson favored Hank Greenspun and American Nevada Corporation. He recalls his twenty-year experience as a developer with the City of Henderson, its planning commission, city manager, city attorney, and city council. He reveals associations with Del Webb and the Del Webb CEO, Anthem, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Sultan of Brunei, and polo fields as well as Red Alerts, the Foothills project, and MacDonald Highlands. Along the way he talks of golf course architects and planners and the MacDonald Highlands golf course, his family, the Great Recession, and his current status with the City of Henderson and the Archaeological Institute of America. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Richard C. MacDonald September 20, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Preface…………………………………………………………………………………..………..iv Parents' 1958 vacation and subsequent 1959 move to Las Vegas, city at that time; teen years in Paradise Palms, graduating Las Vegas High School 1963 and freshman year at Nevada Southern University. Roundup Realty, move to Hawaii, facing racial discrimination, University of Hawaii, and selling blocks of pre-developed cemetery lots to Asian population. Real estate broker's license; father's plan to develop and sell Las Vegas property to Hawaiians; Frank Sala and Chuck Ruthe and two sections of Henderson land--now Sun City MacDonald Ranch and the western part of MacDonald Highlands. ………………………………………………….……..……………. 1–13 Sunridge at MacDonald Ranch on Eastern Avenue and The Canyons at MacDonald Ranch; prejudice against Hawaiians; Hank Greenspun, Green Valley, and American Nevada Corporation. City of Henderson, Planning Commission, and City Council; Ron Hubble and Charlotte Yakubik; Henderson city manager. Del Webb, Anthem, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Sultan of Brunei, and polo field. Wife Claire and Del Webb CEO and Red Alerts; Del Webb Corporation, Foothills project and MacDonald Highlands; David Dubinsky, Bob Husband, Jay Morrish, and MacDonald Highlands golf course. …………………..…..…………………………………. 13–25 Personal residence, wife Claire, and travel business; selling inventory of buildings 2005-2006, clubhouse, 2009 recession, renegotiations with lenders, and selling and buying back golf course and golf club. Current relations with City of Henderson, homeowners, and Hawaii. Brother, jazz guitarist Doug MacDonald. Golf club activities. Archaeological Institute of America …………………………………………………………………………………....…………. 25–38 vii 1 S: Good morning. This is Stefani Evans and Claytee White. It is September 20, 2016, and we are with Richard MacDonald in the beautiful Dragon Ridge Country Club. Mr. MacDonald, for the recording, would you please pronounce and spell your first and last name. Sure. Richard C. MacDonald. R-I-C-H-A-R-D. C. M-A-C-D-O-N-A-L-D. S: And that is with a capital D in the middle of MacDonald. Yes, with a capital D. S: Why don't we begin by you telling us how your family ended up coming to Southern Nevada and tell us about your parents and your siblings. My family was a bit strange that way. They didn't take many vacations but when they did you had a fifty-fifty shot that you would move there. We didn't move to Florida but we did take a trip across the country. My parents were in their early thirties at that point, I'm guessing. They came to Las Vegas, checked into a hotel, went to the Desert Inn. My father knew how to shoot craps. He learned in World War II, one of the things they taught him. He found himself shooting craps with the Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin. The whole gang was there shooting craps at the table with him. He thought he had died and gone to heaven, so did my mom. I guess the Elvis of the day was Frank Sinatra and that whole gang. They were very impressed. Back in those days when you talked to people about Las Vegas, everybody was bullish on the city, even the waiters and waitresses in the hotels had little pieces of property they were paying off that they had invested in. Some had even homesteaded property down further on the Las Vegas Strip. It was interesting to talk to people back then. Of course, everyone was giving you the sales pitch about what a wonderful and dynamic place Las Vegas was. My parents bought it 2 hook, line, and sinker. They moved here one year to the day later [in 1959]. We were driving back to town in my father's 1952 Cadillac with a U-Haul behind it. My brother, my grandmother, and I are in the backseat. At that time, we had 60,000 people in the entire valley, including Boulder City. I think I had more than that in my neighborhood back in Philadelphia. This was such a strange experience for me. S: How old were you? I had to be about fourteen or fifteen years old at that point. Back East the only reference I had to mountains were tall buildings. Philadelphia didn't have a lot of tall buildings, skyscrapers. I decided one day to walk to the mountains, thinking it wasn't all that far. Someone found me walking out there and came up to me in a pickup truck. He said, "Kid, what are you doing out here?" I said, "I’m walking to the mountains." He said, "Boy, you will be walking all day and all night and still aren't going to get there. Hop in. I will give you a ride home." He told my father, "I found your kid out in the desert walking on his way to the mountains, but the mountains out there are pretty far. You can drive up if you take the highway up to Kyle Canyon." We ended up going to see that. My father was in sales and my mother got a job working in the Sahara gift shop and then got a job in the coffee shop as one of the managers. She got to know a lot of the people from that, and so did my father. They just lived a really active life. They would finish work. They would go out afterwards. They would go to all the different lounge shows. There used to be a lot of them back then. They would end up going out target shooting early in the morning, they would ride horses, and then they would go home and go to sleep when the sun came up. C: How did they dress? 3 My parents always dressed impeccably well. As they got more affluent they dressed even better, but they were always well dressed. That was the way it was back then. S: Where did you live? When we first came to town there were apartments next to the shopping center at the corner of what used to be San Francisco [Avenue]—it is now Sahara [Avenue]—and Las Vegas Boulevard. Then we moved to a place called the Pardee Tract down on San Francisco Avenue as well. S: Where was that? It was down, just past Maryland Parkway. It was a duplex; they bought that and rented half of it out, and we lived in the other half. Then they bought a house in Paradise Palms from [Irwin] Molasky and [Merv] Adelson. S: What was the address there? It was on Oneida Way, and I think it was something like 3690. It was right across from what is today the building for Sears, behind it. Back then it was just a big, vacant desert. I used to chase jack rabbits across that thing. My brother and I would go out there and catch lizards. My friends would say, "We can't afford the gas to come out and get you. You are going to have to drive into town and then we will figure out who is going to drive the car after that." S: Because you lived so far out? So far out and of course gas was 25 cents a gallon, so it was really expensive. Of course I think they got eight miles per gallon in those cars back then. My friends all lived around Oakey [Boulevard] and 6th Avenue. They were a pretty affluent group by and large; we weren't, but they were. They said, "Why did you move way out there in the middle of 4 nowhere." I said, "Well, my parents liked the house." It was a nice house, it was a nice area. S: Do you know who built the house? [Irwin] Molasky and [Merv] Adelson were the builders of Paradise Homes, I think. People like Betty Grable and Harry James lived there. There were a couple of other entertainers that lived there, too. Nice group of people down there. It was a nice area, actually. S: Where did you go to school? I went to [Las] Vegas High [School]; that was really the only option. There was Vegas and Rancho [High School]; [Bishop] Gorman [High School] was a little, tiny school. There weren't that many options. In sophomore year they split our class in half and half of them went to Western [High School] when they opened that school. We had a small class that graduated because of that. S: What year was that? I graduated in 1963, so that had to have been in 1961 or 1962. S: Who were some of your classmates? Probably no one you would know. Not many I know going back and looking. My friends didn't end up going to any of the reunions, so I haven't bothered to go back either. A guy named Gary Ashworth. He works for the [Las Vegas] Convention Center now. Ron Cantor. I don't know whatever happened to Ron. Ken Clark. Ken's dad use to manage Pat Clark's Pontiac years ago. Kenny is living in Las Alamitos, down in Southern California. They have all scattered out pretty good. Bottom line is that I went to high school here and then started at UNLV [in 1964 Nevada Southern University] and then my parents took another vacation—this time to 5 Hawaii. I didn't go because I was here and busy. I got the phone call and I said, "Dad, don't tell me you are going to move there." When you are a freshman in college you are really brilliant. I wish I was as brilliant now as I was then. He said, "No, no. We are going move here. We are going to come back and sell everything and move here." I said, "Dad, it is a rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You can't live there." He said, "It is a big rock and you would really like it if you came here and looked at it." I said, "I am not leaving Las Vegas. I am staying here." They came back and sold everything and moved lock, stock, and barrel to Hawaii. They took my brother and my grandmother with them and away they went. I got a little studio apartment on Maryland Parkway that was a depressing, dark, dank little place, kind of musty. I had that place and tried to look for a job that summer and I couldn't find a job to save my life. There was a company called Roundup Realty that crashed, almost literally. I think the owner was blown up in a boat on Lake Mead and died. The whole empire fell apart. They had tracts of four-plexes, tracts of houses. I think it was owned by the same family that owned the Westward Ho Hotel. There were at least ten to twelve housing tracts everywhere. They all went belly up. No one got paid. It was a disaster. Houses weren't finished. The only job I could get that summer was trying to sell these things. It was like, give me fifty bucks and you can have this house and you'll make payments or whatever. The problem is you get somebody willing to buy one. Then they would go back in and look at the place the second time and something would be missing. One of the contractors had broken in and maybe stolen all the cabinets out of it or taken all the appliances out of it. S: Because they hadn't been paid? 6 Because they hadn't been paid. Sometimes they even took the wiring out of it. That happened too. It was a nightmare. You couldn't get anything closed. I was only working on a commission basis. You didn't need a license to sell unfinished houses. I thought, this isn't going to work. I am going to have to find a job out of town. They had just had the earthquake in Alaska and they needed more people to help rebuild. I thought, I'll go up there and get a job, and work there and make some money for school. I called my father and told him this is my new plan. He said, "Do you think your car will make it?" Then a long silence ensued because my car would be lucky to get out of town. Half of it was a 1955 Chevy and the other half was a 1956 Chevy. A little bit of a tenuous effect. I said, "No, my car probably won't get out of the county." He said, "Do you have a plan B?" I said, "No. Do you?" He said, "Yes. I do." I said, "What is your plan B?" He said, "We send you a ticket. Leave your car where ever you have it. Forget about it. Someone will pick it up and haul it away. Put the key in it. We will send you a ticket and you can live with us for free, get a job as a waiter or bus boy for six hours a night, and you can chase girls on Waikiki Beach all day." I said, "Dad, I'm there. Send me the ticket." I packed up my stereo which had a lot of miles on it—it went back and forth a lot—and my record collection. I shipped it all back. Went to Hawaii. Of course, that was a really huge experience. C: Do you think they had made a good decision at that time? It was a bigger island than I thought. S: Did you try to walk to the mountains? No, but I could have. I walked up in the mountains frequently because it was nice hiking back through those things. It was a good place, actually, for a young guy to experience life 7 because it was interesting. You had people from all over the world living there. There were Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese. There were all kinds of races there, which was nice. It was also interesting that there was a certain amount of prejudice against people from the US mainland. Most Caucasians don't experience that. I did. Looking for a job they would say we don't hire your kind, with a kind of a sneer. It was almost like a punch in the stomach. I said, "What do you mean? What is my kind?" They would say, you white people. We don't hire you. I said, "Who do you hire?" He said, "We only hire Japanese. That is all we hire. We are not interested." Wow, that was pretty brutal, but I understood what their concern was. They were afraid of being replaced on their island with a whole bunch of people flooding in from the mainland. It was an interesting experience to deal with. Most [white] people in this country never experience that. Good thing to know. I understood that and dealt with it. I kept going back to school and getting bored because I would take business classes and they would put me to sleep. S: Was this at the University of Hawaii? Yes. Planning, organizing, directing, and staffing. I would think, give me a break, it has to get better than this. Then I would do history, which is one of my passions. I would say I really can't do this. I am interested in it, but I don't want to teach history. I need something I can make some money with. So I go back to Business and get bored. Then I would go to Art. It kept going back and forth. In the meantime my father got me involved in these little sales jobs, and I was a really shy kid. I was shy and introverted and had no experience in sales. In Vegas you live in everything that is brand new. All these houses are new here, even back in those days. The only old houses were downtown; everything else was brand new. When my parents knew I 8 was coming over they moved into a house. The house was built prior to World War II. It had termite damage, which everything in Hawaii has termite damage, almost. It was old and run-down and I thought they must really be having hard financial problems. I thought I better get a job and help the family. I said to my father, "What kind of job do you have here?" He said, "I'm working at a cemetery." And I said, "You are working at a cemetery? Like what, digging graves?" He said, "No, no. Selling cemetery lots." I'm thinking this isn't a job. That is ridiculous. He said, "You should come down." I thought I would humor him and I would go out and get a job as a waiter or a busboy so I could help. I'll humor him and do this. I go down to this place and there is a guy from the Deep South that doesn't have much of a handle on the English. It is hard to understand him. The sales staff is from all over the world. There is a music composer from Korea, there are Chinese people. It is very diverse and there is also a military guy who got drunk and walked off a roof and broke his ankle. He was on crutches. There were a lot of different characters. Another guy looked like a bull frog, Marvin Booker—he went on to buy a wife, but that is a different story. There are a lot of good stories from this episode. They had the sales meeting and they are talking about the different aspects of the business and selling and how you sell. Then they gave the paychecks out. This was 1964. The Korean composer gets a check for $14,000 for the week! Wow! And guess who the number two guy is? My father. He gets a check for about $12,000 to $13,000 for the week. I'm thinking, "Damn. Maybe I do want to do this job." Then they go on to explain that what they are doing is selling big blocks of these cemetery lots to people. They are selling pre-developed, graves are 360 sq. ft. and they sell them for $10 per sq. ft., pre-developed. 9 S: What does that mean? Before they put the grass on, before it is surveyed, before anything. They are selling it off the map, so to speak. In the Oriental communities you get a lot of status by making arrangements for your entire family. If you have a big family, which a lot of people did, you basically can get this huge tract of lots that you've put together, so when people die in your family they all can be buried there. You don't have some at-need salesman taking the poor widow and trying to over-sell her, which is typically what happens in that field. Widows are grief stricken and they end up spending more money than they should. They should be conservative and keeping track of their money. I thought this was just scandalous. This is immoral selling these things. Part of the pitch was that if this goes up two cents per square foot, you are making $600 to $700 at a time. Well, I said, "This is ridiculous. That is just not going to happen." Today you can buy those for $7,500, which is a lot more than $390. I didn't know much about what I was talking about then. I sold them, but they wouldn't give me any leads so they made me go door to door. I had so many doors slammed in my face it is amazing that I still have any definition of my nose, because it should be flat. That was my first entry into sales, which was a pretty good entry. S: Did you overcome your shyness? I wasn't very shy after that. Not very shy at all. In fact, I did get into other sales jobs. I sold for Technicolor, little film packages, so people could take pictures of their kids; then there was the super-8 film and all that in that package. I did alright, but I didn't set the world on fire. I got myself some walking-around money while I was going to school. Later my parents got into real estate, and I really liked that. I thought that was pretty good. I sat down and got my license. I was one of the youngest guys in the state of Hawaii 10 to get their license. Then I sat [for the exam] right away, as soon as I could, to get my broker's license. I was a young broker early on. I was working four hours a day and I was making about $30,000 a year, which was pretty good. The company would give us money to fly people to the other islands to show them the properties. We had property in Kahlua Kona, the big island, all over. We had a lot of different properties. They also gave you money, cash, to buy people dinners and lunches and things like that. I didn't do a lot of dinners because I didn't want to spend that much time over there. I sometimes took them for brunch in the morning and then I found a better routine. I usually took more of the younger people over. I would take them over to a place called the Queen's Bath, which was a collapsed lava tube surrounded by palm trees and let them sit there and dangle their feet in the water of the lava tube. It was just a really pleasant, idyllic scene for them to enjoy. On the way down I would buy them some anthurium at an anthurium farm. Next door was a little drive-in, and I got them a papaya shake, which you could never get on the mainland. These were things that they couldn't get that were really interesting and it didn't cost me a lot of money, so I pocketed the rest of that. I always had plenty of walking-around money in those days. It was a nice life. You worked four hours in the morning, four hours in the next afternoon, and four hours in the evening the next day, and then you are off. Then you would do it all over again, so it was fun. C: So at that time you were not going to school? I was when I first started. Then I calculated what I would make if I got a degree in business and I said, "You know what. This is crazy. I am just better off getting a job, 11 because I don't want to work for somebody else. I like working for myself." And frankly, that was the last time I ever did work for anybody else. It dawned on me fairly early on that the guys making the big money were the guys owning the properties, the subdividers. So I said to my dad, "We need to buy a subdivision and sell it." He said, "Do you know of anything?" I said, "I have my eye on a couple of them." We looked at a few of them, but it didn't work out. The problem was that we didn't have the location either. We went to our boss, who was maybe five years older than I was, and he was working for his father. His father was the actual subdivider. He said, "We will take the listing, but we don't want to do that because we make our money selling my dad's property. So we are not happy about doing that, but we will do it as an accommodation." I got the message. Later my father got the idea of buying property in Las Vegas, because everyone in Hawaii loves Las Vegas. I thought, boy I don't know if I like that idea. Then I thought about it a little bit and I said, "You know what, you might have something there." S: So still working from Hawaii? Right. S: Marketing to Hawaiians? Right, that was the plan. S: What year was this? That had to be 1969–1970. C: Had the Boyd Group started bringing people over at that time? No, not yet. This is prior to that. We had a chance to buy in with them, but we didn't do it. I talked them out of it. I try not to remind my mother of that anymore. We ended up coming over and looking at property. There was a fella named Frank Sala and Chuck 12 Ruthe, who is still around. Frank Sala was a really great guy. They had two sections of land. It was a who's who of all the old-time Las Vegans who owned these properties. Their group owned two sections. The city of Henderson had gotten some property from the federal government to try and increase their tax base. These people all owned it, a group of nineteen individuals owned these two sections of land. They wanted something like $550 an acre. S: Where were these pieces of land? Sun City MacDonald Ranch and the western part of MacDonald Highlands. In wandering around over here I found someone who owned three sections right behind them, which was a guy by the name of David Boyer Senior, not the son. The son is still around. We ended up buying the first two pieces. We didn't have enough money to buy them completely ourselves, so we put them in escrow and we went back home. My mother, my father, and myself each decided to go back to our customers and try and put a limited partnership together, one on each section, which we did. We basically raised the money for the down payment that way and then we decided to sell these pieces in forty-acre parcels to other investors, so we did that for two or three years and made enough to pay for everything. Plus, we planned to keep some of the property and sell the rest of it. We did that, and it worked pretty well. We bought some other property from the Boyers. There were two sections of land that we bought. There was a third that we didn't buy because it was too rough. That is the one that Ascaya just bought, with all those terraces. We didn't like that kind of development so we didn't want to do that sort of thing. We bought the two pieces from the Boyers and that 13 became Sunridge at MacDonald Ranch on Eastern Avenue and another village called The Canyons at MacDonald Ranch. As we started to do the plans and go into all of that we had other issues. Henderson in those days was operating out of a series of trailers. We went out there and one of the planning people said, "You know, if you get this project going, you are going to bring a bunch of those Hawaiian people over here." I said, "Those Hawaiian people are some of the best people you will ever meet. They have the values that we had in this country fifty years ago. When they tell you the check is in the mail, you know what, the check really is in the mail. You can take their word for things." He didn't care about that. He was basically just a bigot, a red-neck bigot. There was a lot of that back in those days. We had problems getting things done back there in Henderson. Basically, just before we bought, there was another company that was buying 4,700 acres there, and it turns out that was Hank Greenspun's group. They thought it was D. K. Ludwig, who at that time was the richest man in the world, but it was in the name of American Nevada. That was very similar to American Hawaiian Steamship Company, which is what D. K. Ludwig used as his flagship to develop Westlake Village in Northern L.A. [Los Angeles County]. Some of the individuals that were the front people for Greenspun had worked for D. K. Ludwig. Until the actual sale happened everyone thought it was D. K. Ludwig. Turned out it was Hank Greenspun. Of course, Hank was supposed to put all the utilities in but never did. It was supposed to be done within a five-year period. When we bought our property the City told us it would have utilities within a few years. It never happened. Our short-term plan became a very long-term plan because Hank 14 didn't have the money to develop Green Valley. They took all the land in front of ours and chopped it up into ten-acre parcels, and they sold them to ease cash flow. C: They did that to acquire some operating cash? Right. Smart plan, but it was definitely not how it was represented to us by the City. Plus, we still had problems because then the City had an ax to grind to protect that project. They didn't want competition. They said, "We don't want anything developing south until after all Green Valley is developed. We would rather have it orderly and neat." You know what, life doesn't work that way. You sold it to us with the idea that you would develop your tax base, and we need to be able to develop, too. We are paying your taxes. They said, "But, that is not how we want to do it." We had major challenges there. I had a battle [with the City of Henderson] that ensued for twenty to twenty-five years, which was a long, hard-fought struggle to get everything done. I had to go every Planning Commission meeting and every City Council meeting. If we didn't go there would be a law passed that would be detrimental to our development. They tried to initially create a one-house-per-five-acre-plan for everything south of the highway. I organized all the property owners that American Nevada had sold to. We got newspaper and TV coverage and we began beating the drum about how unfair this was and how they are doing it to protect "big developers" and basically got it stopped and turned around. When I did that some of the political people said, "Who is this guy who is giving us all this grief? Let's get to know who he is." They were pretty much the same age I was. They were a new group that got in and they were pretty good to work with once I got to know them well and they realized, "Let's treat this guy alright." We began to get some things approved and things started to happen and then the "good old boys" came and 15 kicked them out of office. We were back to square one again and we had more problems again. S: Who were some of these good guys you enjoyed working with? Ron Hubble, Charlotte Yakubik. There was another one but he turned out to be crook. There was a lot of turmoil. When that whole thing shifted back then they got a new city manager. When the new city manager came on board there was a deal put together with the Collins Brothers, who had about 1,000 acres just north of Lake Mead Drive, where Green Valley South is today, where Wigwam [Avenue] is today, that was their main street between Eastern [Avenue] and Green Valley Parkway. It was like two sections. They were deciding to build the Legacy Golf Course along with the America Nevada people and Mark Fine. The bottom line there is that someone cut a deal so that we would not be able to get any re-use water for a golf course, which is what you needed in order to do a golf course in Henderson as part of that deal. The new manager had the task to tell me that. I went ballistic. First of all that is blatantly illegal. You cannot deprive someone of due process to cut a deal with somebody else who is your buddy. That is not right. I went off on him because he should have been smart enough to let them know that. But he was a new guy on board and he was basically trying to care of what he had to take care of for himself. I went off on him and happened to mention it to one of the guys I thought was a friend on the council. I said, "Where the hell did you get this guy? He should have told you guys." They said, "We didn't think you had the money to do the project anyway." I said, "You have no idea what I have access to and it is really none of your business. Your job is to get things approved so if I do have the money or can get the money I can get it done. I have 16 never had a problem with not finding a way to accomplish objectives." He said, "Well, we didn't think that would be a problem." He goes back and tells the city manager, "That Rich MacDonald is trying to get you fired." For the next twenty years that this guy was in office, we had to attend every meeting because otherwise they did things like create a hillside ordnance that I had to fight to get