Francis Suarez
speaker
100 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 21 Nov
Francis Suarez’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
There's a 5 million housing shortage across the country, and Miami has its fair share just like any other major city. Traffic, I know none of you guys have experienced any bad traffic this last few days, right?
I'm not going to tell you how far along we are with a boring company on trying to find underground boring systems or with some of the EV toll companies that we're working with. But I do think that transportation generally has to sort of turn the page from last generation's archaic solutions to the next generation.
How did you get that done so quick? And everybody says it's the greatest thing ever. That's a private sector project that was done by a company. We had a piece of it, which was we did a piece with TriRail to bring it into the station. And when we did that piece, we made it free for inner city residents to be able to use. So it was something that I was very proud of. It was part of my legacy.
So a private company built it.
No, they bought the right of way. So it was totally private. So look, we have micro mobility options that are private, like scooters and things like that.
Exactly. Shocking, by the way.
Wow, what an idea.
We're not stuck. I think it's cultural at some level. You have to inculcate a culture where you empower your employees to innovate and to de-conflict. I think when people come to me with a problem, I say, look, first issue is if there's something that's blocking it that doesn't make any sense, why don't we just change it? We're legislators. That's what we do. We legislate so we can fix it.
Maybe it happened. Maybe it made sense 20 years ago. Maybe it made sense 50 years ago. It doesn't make sense today. Let's just change it. I think regulation is the other side of the coin from innovation. So regulation is telling you oftentimes what you can't do or how to do something. Innovation is- To protect loss. It's sort of a first principle thinking. We want to do this, right?
We want to make this work. And I think I always, not always, but I regularly fall on the side of innovation. And I think you as a public official, frankly, who's elected by the people, really are the one that has to push the bureaucrats, the bureaucrat class. The bureaucrat class, they get very accustomed to saying no. They're risk averse. They're not incentivized oftentimes.
There's no incentive structure that says, hey, if you innovate, you're going to get X or Y or Z. And then I think the third piece of it is artificial intelligence. I really feel that there's a breakthrough that's going to come. And it's not just in transportation. We're talking about EV tolls and underground boring and all that. But I think in...
zoning codes and all that, it's gonna be computer to computer, right? So the codes are all straightforward, right? We have the same code for 15 years, right? Probably 97 or 8% of all known decisions have already been made under this code, right? So all you have to do is be replicated going forward, right?
Unless the code changes and then you just change the coding and you make the decisions all over again. So it's not that complicated. You should be able to submit something. The computer should be able to spit it out immediately. If it needs changes, it should tell you what the changes are. a computer could look at that, make the changes and spit it back in, right?
And if you were to do that, you know, it takes to get a permit on a home in most places in America or on a building in most places in America, you know, six months, nine months, a year, a year and a half. I mean, it's insane. It should be done instantly. And it could literally be done instantly with a technology that we already have available to us today.
$100 billion business, by the way, in case anybody wants it. It's a great idea.
I kind of like the first one better than the second one because the second one, I mean, this sort of one for one, I mean, There's got to be a reason to do one or the other, right? I like the first one better. Actually, what we normally do in government is the opposite. What we do is we do what we call pilots, right? So you'll do something that goes away very quickly, right?
In other words, you implement a piece of legislation and say, oh, we're going to do it for a year. Let's test it out, right? And it's a pilot. And then it goes away. I like what you're saying in terms of, you know, a big part of regulatory culture can probably be phased out over a 15, 20-year period as being anachronistic, right? It just doesn't work anymore.
Right. And then you have the ability to re-implement it if you think it makes sense. But I think what happens is you go back down to zero. You were asking, and Tony, and I was listening to the conversation, because we did it, like I said, we had to cut our budget by 20% in one year. And part of the problem is Budgeting is like layering, right? It all layers on top of each other.
Same as regulation, it layers on top of each other. So if you were to be able to strip it down in a mechanical way, right, in an instantaneous way, as opposed to having to fight the structures. In our case, we were very lucky. There was a state statutory vehicle that allowed us to implement the cuts. Otherwise, we'd have to bargain for them in a union process.
And obviously no one would ever bargain to cut their salaries or never bargain to cut their- Nothing would have happened. Nothing would have happened. We would have been bankrupt. And then a court would have taken us over. We would have looked like a joke. And instead we cut costs and we survived and we thrived, right? Going forward. And by the way, my employees now love me.
Showing 61–80 of 100 · page 4 of 5
← Previous
Next →