Recently, our hometown, Farron in our hometown, was rocked by the negligence of a company
called Skanska. And I think people need to understand how Skanska, a company like Skanska
affects towns all over America. Give me the story about Skanska and let's draw some parallels
between how people react to local politics, would you.
Right. Well, well right here in our town with Skanska, you know, we just had hurricane Sally
came through. They're building a bridge for us. It's the only way in and out of that town
at the moment, unless you want to take a two hour detour. They didn't secure their barges
that they're using to build the bridge, the barges get loose, they smack into the bridge,
they break it. It's no longer operable. The barges then get washed up into other areas,
more destruction. They were in peoples, people's backyards.
Right. And so Skanska says, or Skanska says, yeah, we're, you know, sorry, but, oh well.
Not much we can do. And so we decided, well, well, who is this company? And we look into
it and we find out that not only have they been doing similar negligent projects across
the United States, they have been found internationally to be paying bribes, to be paying off cartels.
I mean, this is an international company. Okay. Fraud.
Yeah. Bribery, interaction with cartels, so they
can pull off their business. This, this is a, this is a, they're make, bring in $18 billion
a year. It's one of the biggest construction companies on the globe. They happen to be
in Sweden, but they got offices all over the United States. This is the new norm. Skanska
is the new disgusting norm. And what's so bothersome about Skanska, is it never should
have happened here in Pensacola. Right.
Why did it happen? How did, how is it that they had public hearings where Skanska is
standing up saying, we want to build your bridge. One, it's one, it's a huge bridge,
it's a three, three mile bridge across a massive waterway. And so they stand up, we can do
this for you. And oh, by the way, you know, we're going to be the low bidder and oh, by
the way, when you evaluate how they came, as far as, as far as their evaluation in the
process of saying, is this the company, or should we, or these other two companies, the
company. When they go through that evaluation process, these people on the bottom, of almost
everything. Yeah.
And so, so, but why did it happen? How did it happen?
It happened because, you know, we got to admit here, we weren't paying attention.
Right. And not just we as a community, but, but we
weren't either. We, me, me and you, we weren't. We weren't.
But, there, there were these meetings. Yeah.
The city council meetings, the town hall meetings, the things that we think of, oh, no, that's
something people did in the forties. No, they talk about this kind of things. They talk
to whoever shows up and they say, this is the company we're leaning towards. Does anybody
have any objections, any problems with this? Anything we should look at? But because most
people think that activism is only on a national scale.
Right. You've to show up at the latest protest, or
you got to vote against Trump. No, it's all local. Politics starts locally.
Right. And if we get more involved locally, it's
going to have the impact that we want to have nationally.
Okay. We, we should have been at the meetings. Yes.
Where they had public meetings. We are in the business of news. We could have found
out about the frauds. We could have found out about the bribery. We could have found
about the failures, where people are killed because they're, they're, they're building
process was so awful that people were actually killed. There was a bridge that collapsed
down in Orlando. It was, as soon as it was open.
Yeah. Six or seven people died. But the point is,
if nobody shows up at the hearing, you have politicians who are dysfunctional, that are
going to just, they, they don't even, they don't even take a look, a serious look at
anything. That happened with Skanska here. Yeah.
You have lawyers working for the department of, in this situation, the department of transportation
that signed off on a contract that a flying monkey moron would not have signed off on.
But again, we had a responsibility to do something and we didn't do it. We could have stopped
these folks. We could have stopped them in their tracks at that hearing. We, we have
businesses that will not be in business a year from now.
Some of them have already shut down. Yeah.
Some of them, right near that bridge, since there's no longer any traffic and no need
to go that way, have already closed their doors. These are businesses, one of them was
the first job I ever had when I turned 15. It is gone now.
Yeah. It had been in that city for 40 years.
And we can't, and the, it's complicated, but we're doing what we can to fix it, but where
we really dropped the ball, you and I should have shown up and people should have shown
up for those early hearings where they're, where they're up in front of an audience saying,
we're your folks. Thank you, Farron.