3.22.25 Seth Grossman WPG Radio

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3.22.25 Seth Grossman WPG Radio

Black Uber driver voted Trump.

Councilman George Tibbitt talks Convention / Boardwalk Hall.

Senator Bill Gormley made very big mistake. Build new conference hall to far off the boardwalk. Homeless right next door.

What to do ? Sell conference ctr. Convert old Boardwalk Hall back to a Conference Ctr.

Foolish sand dunes

The Boardwalk was built in 1894 in order to look at the ocean and get sand off shoes before entering hotels.

One bad hurricane will destroy dunes in a few minutes.

Homeless are not homeless. They are mentally ill.

Every time I come to Florida and I take the Uber or the Lyft, to get from the airport to my daughter’s house, I always seem to have a nice conversation with the Lyft driver or the Uber driver. 

I had a chance to speak to my first random young black man who was proud of the fact that he voted for Donald Trump. I met some older, black Americans, but this is the first young guy. It was interesting because our conversation started, when I asked him in Florida where he was from, he said he was in Brooklyn. I mentioned I had been in Brooklyn for the Jewish holiday of Purim last weekend, and, we started going through the various neighborhoods in Brooklyn. And then he randomly told me that in a safe black neighborhood, that he was used to, growing up, one of his friends, in broad daylight was robbed by a member of a Venezuelan gang with who had tattoos and was on a motorbike and he was so outraged that it’s not safe a black man can’t be safe in our own neighborhoods, because of all these illegal immigrants.

He volunteered the fact that he was so happy that Trump is finally doing something to round them up and send them out. And, he said I never ever voted, Republican in my life. I voted for Donald Trump last November, and, we’ve got to do something about these illegal immigrants.

The movement for an, a constitutional convention to change our constitution. And a lot of Republicans and a lot of good conservatives are on the wrong side of this issue. I don’t know if you had any conversation before, but, we have a constitution that has limits on the federal government. The federal government’s only supposed to be spending money on national projects for national purposes. The federal government is not supposed to be fixing potholes in Atlantic City. It’s not supposed to be buying fire engines for a volunteer fire department. It’s not supposed to be moving sand from one part of the beach to the other. It’s supposed to deal with national problems that state and local governments couldn’t deal, by themselves. 

We have these evil Democrats and stupid Republicans. So as long as we have stupid Republicans or clueless conservatives who think it’s a good idea, the left is going to manipulate us into making this happen. It it so it is a danger. So the key thing is to hit our republican legislators.

I’m gonna take a couple of issues that George Tibbitt talked about. One of them is, like, Atlantic Avenue in Atlantic City is a mess. It’s like going into a third world country. In fact, it’s worse than a third world country because I was in Guatemala, and Atlantic Avenue is worse than anything they have in Guatemala from what I could see. And why isn’t it getting fixed? Well, they’ll tell you, well, the the mayor says we can’t fix it because the federal government isn’t giving us the money. And the federal government is isn’t giving us the money because we don’t wanna have a stupid road diet to turn Atlantic Avenue, our main thoroughfare, into a, one lane going in each direction. So so what’s the problem here? The real problem is during the last twenty years, New Jersey has made it too expensive for the government to do anything. 

The government can’t build a firehouse unless it costs $5,000,000 to build a garage for a fire truck. Right? We can’t build a circle around the airport, you know, to to turn a circle into traffic lights. That costs $6,000,000 and took six years. So why is everything so expensive? Well, you add it up. The unions have their rules. You know, every union could only do a certain job. It has to be done a certain way. They have to have an apprenticeship program. And then on top of that, you have all the environmental regulations. And then on top of that, you have all the diversity, equity and inclusion requirements. 

Instead, we have Atlantic Avenue looks worse than anything you’ll see in Guatemala, and it’s not gonna change until we deal with the fundamental problem. A second thing that, that that Tibbett pointed out, is we have all these mistakes that were made where politicians made stupid mistakes. Like, Convention Hall, I had been on the boardwalk in Atlantic City since the nineteen twenties. 

Convention hall brought life to the boardwalk in the wintertime. It was a perfect location. And then suddenly had one bad politician called Republican senator Bill Gormley, thought it was a genius idea to take the Convention Hall off the boardwalk and put it in the middle of nowhere. And and by the way, the first time I ever heard Donald Trump make a political statement was back in 1990 when the state was gonna take over Atlantic City because it said we were too corrupt. I was a councilman at the time. Thank you, sir.

 So Trump is talking to these top state politicians. He said, you think Atlantic City screwed up. You guys in Trenton are really screwed up. He said, you take the convention you take the train station and you put it in the middle of nowhere. You put the convention hall, right next to the train station, and then you put the homeless shelter right next to both of them. How stupid could you be talking about the state? So somehow we have to talk about doing what George Tibbets said, sell that monstrosity empty convention hall in the middle of nowhere and where the train station is and and turn the the old Boardwalk Hall back into a convention hall again and do stuff like that. 

A second one is, the sand dunes. The whole reason the boardwalk was built in 1854 was so people could come down from Philadelphia, get off the train, and look at the ocean without tracking sand into the hotels and tracking sand into the train. Now you get on the boardwalk, you can’t see the ocean, so you have these ugly piles of sand in a way that makes absolutely no sense. Any expert will tell you that if there’s a bad hurricane, one wave would melt away all those sand dunes in five minutes. So it’s there for nothing.

And you look at your historic pictures of Atlantic City from the 1910, ’19 ’20, beautiful flat beach attracted people. We’ve got to get back to that again. And and another thing that no one’s dealing with is the homeless, that we talked about because the homeless are not really homeless. Ninety five percent are mentally ill, drunks, criminal. We used to call them, hobos. We used to call them, tramps. We used to call them bums. But, you know, Atlantic City is finally starting to deal with it.

They just passed an ordinance that’s now illegal in Atlantic City, to bring shopping carts on a boardwalk unless you have some legitimate need, other than using it as your living space. And that from now on, all those homeless piles of, personal belongings, if they’re abandoned, the airport rule now applies in Atlantic City. That just like you can’t leave unattended luggage in an airport, you can’t leave unattended luggage in the boardwalk. So it’s the first step towards understanding instead of encouraging and catering to the people who we call homeless, we’ve got to get them away from the casinos, away from the tourists. Otherwise, they’re gonna kill our tourist industry.