Campaign Video Transcript

All right, I ain't finished. See, I need y'all people to tell people our message cuz they ain't going to get it out cuz they don't want you to hear the truth. I don't got no speech up here. I ain't reading off no card. I ain't looking down. I'm telling you what's in my heart.

So we are 15th in the state and we are the poorest county. Now think about that. We the most populated county but we are the poorest county. I'm going to tell you how we got there. We got there for my pet peeves — it's so messed up that you can't get involved in a county because your car insurance is too high to be inside of the city or the county you live. And if you don't believe me, I'm going to give you a sample. I was talking to a gentleman yesterday. He said his car is 10 years old, is worth $10,000 or less, and he paying $400 a month in car insurance. Now, if that ain't a reason to leave Detroit and Wayne County, I don't know what it is. If you know the math, that's $1,400 a year on a car worth $10,000. But I'm telling you, as Wayne County Executive—

The first thing I'm going to do is open up three divisions. We're going to open up an insurance division. We're going to open up a senior citizen care division. And we're going to open up something for autistic children. We're going to make a whole new department. People say, “Wayne County, you can't do that.” You ain't going to tell me what I can do — vote for me. I'm not asking just people I know. I'm asking 1.7 million, cuz when I make these changes, I'm going to need the backing of 1.7 million. Cuz when I tell them we on our way, if the state legislators say you can't do that and the governor say you can't do that — I just told you it's one fifth of the whole state. What they going to say? They can do it, cuz they ain't going to want to lose their power.

It's all about revenue. Everything we talking about — insurance, property taxes — it's about revenue. Give you an example: when I say we going to open up our own insurance, it's already being done. What are we doing? We're creating revenue so the cities here don't have to be raising up taxes. They believe all they can do is raise taxes to get revenue. That's why the first thing I'm going to do is meet with all the city mayors and managers and tell them we got a different plan. So if we generate $400 million a month just off car insurance — we ain't added the homeowners, we ain't had the businesses — if I do another $200 each, that'll be $1.2 billion every month. That's a lot of money. We ain't inventing waste because we tax to death — let's get clean all the way up. Then we can set a system.

Even if we got to start paying grocery tax again, I'd rather pay taxes on groceries than have a gentleman lose their house. Cuz I believe if you own your house, no matter what your situation may be, you should be able to come back. So if we keep their house together, at least they can come home. We cannot take people's houses with no circumstances — especially if we got revenues other than the property tax, cuz it's all revenue. Don't even call it property tax no more. It's called being greedy. Absolutely is not.

You have kids in ninth grade reading on a fifth grade level. My daughter's an educator. So, at the end of the day, we have to take some of these funds — revenue — and have better educators tutoring for our schools, because most of these parents are working now, unlike when we were growing up, to tutor and educate their children. We have to bring Detroit back. And I know this is Wayne County, but we want to bring Detroit back — educate our children. Bring vo-tech back into the school system so when you graduate, you have a trade, so you can have a career, so you don't end up on food stamps and trying to get Section 8, and become a generational worker — the richest by putting people to work and us being as one.

Let y'all know: this is for the contractors in Wayne County. Under my administration the bonding is eliminated — the wins are going to get paid for the contracts we put out. If they don't come through, we're going to source it ourselves so we can eat. I'm going to give you a sample: if I got a $200 million bond, that's a $200 million contract. I'm not going to give it to one person. I'm going to give it to 20 people. That means 20 families are eating off $10 million right now, instead of one or two contractors.

The Wayne County executive and the Wayne County commissioners should work together to hold the Sheriff's Department accountable, cuz their performance is terrible. Nearly all their traffic stops are radio traffic stops — meaning the car does not have a computer in it. None of the Wayne County cars the sheriff's patrolling in have a computer in them. Wayne County also does not have active sheriffs that patrol right now, and they do not have a midnight shift. It's so bad that when the mass shooting situation happened at Fairlane Mall and Dearborn PD responded and asked every agency to send somebody — the county sheriff sent a car, state police showed up, Homeland Security showed up, Allen Park showed up — but Wayne County didn't have a car. They had to stop a transport vehicle so a supervisor could ride to the scene, just so it didn't look so embarrassing. What's been going on — is it working?

With the same old people who have held these positions for I don't know how many years — it's not working. And you have nothing to lose by giving someone new with different ideas a chance, because when you look around, everything's falling apart, crumbling down. We've seen everybody make a great migration to Southfield, Oak Park, West Bloomfield — I don't know where everybody thinks they're going — and ultimately they still want to tiptoe back into the city and look around with disgust and sadness. So I think, if nothing else, give me a chance, because when you look around, you can see the people who have held onto these positions are not doing anything.

And if you're paying taxes — I got a dollar bill in my pocket, and dollars don't vote, people vote. I ain't going to take no money from the insurance company. I'm not going to take money from DTE Energy. I'm not going to take money from the people I'm against, cuz I'm for people. Of course I don't want that money, cuz I'm not selling my people out for their money — cuz if you take their money, you owe them something, and that something ain't going to be to help us, it's going to be about them. Money don't vote. If we get the message out, there's nothing they can do, because we ain't lying about nothing.

Forget the D's and the R's — it ain't no D's all good, it ain't no R's all good. But you got to make one dot on your ballot. If you don't want to make one dot, if you ain't got no ink in your pen, find Michael Evans and make one dot right there. You got to make one dot. If your pen's running out of ink, go down and make one dot there. That's all I'm asking. All right — love y'all coming out. I hope y'all let people know what we're talking about, cuz they ain't going to do it. We got to do it. Thank you.