OODA Loop in City Hall: How El Segundo's Mayor Is Running America's Most Adaptive City | Chris Pimentel

What am I getting at? The underlying message is very simple then. There is no layout.

Unless we can eliminate the feature just sighted. Well,

I don't know. We don't know how to do this.

There is no layout.

Did you ever think 29 years ago that one day we'll be recording a podcast together and you were

the mayor of a city in California? 100%. Obviously. My magic eight ball. This was the part of the

hexagon that popped up. I was definitely on the definitely on the bingo card of young 21-year-olds

at the time. Magic eight ball described by 2020s. You will be in a mid-size city on a podcast with

the artillery officer next to you. I tell you, you're 76 or two, right? In terms of birth year?

Yeah. I didn't realize we were going to go into that level of depth on age. I'm obviously 27.

Well, no, I know that we both hit a milestone this year. Well, at least I do in May.

Well, so what's the, is it Joy Division's lead singer? It was like,

if you're nothing good happens after 25. So, good day.

Well, I was actually for this, I normally wear this black hoodie and the Yankees had like 99%

of the podcast record, but I actually was going to put on the 1976, we have our official logo.

Like, if we were born in 76, we've got that star logo. I have the t-shirt. This being the

250th, you know, what about a time to wear it, I guess, but that's right. It is the year of the dragon.

Now we're the, we're the fiery horse this year, I believe.

I believe so. So, all right, Chris Pimentel, meh, I've also got the brother marine, OCS classmate

from the summer of 97. Here we are. I tell you, what, one of the gets you on the show,

I was out recording with a friend of mine, John Becker, on his podcast, The Debrief,

and I flew out to LA, and then I had an extra day to stay out there, and I spent that with you

in El Segundo. And I was absolutely floored of what's going on, because I think there's what happens

in California, and then there's like the rest of the world, what everybody thinks is happening in

California, depending on where you get your news from. But what really blew me away was, you know,

one, my buddy's the mayor, right? But number two, it's like, wow, there's a lot going on here.

Like this is a thriving, hopping town. What is happening in El Segundo? What do you put in the water

out there? Yeah, you know, I think part of it, and you touch on this a little bit, is you've got

a carve out sort of the noise around you and say, what does our city do? And any state that is

bigger than Canada, population wise, bigger than Australia, there is a very, besides the diverse

demographics, there are diverse cultures, there's different ways to approach things, and we're fortunate

in El Segundo that going back for a hundred years, this has been a spot in Los Angeles County,

which has 88 cities might do, but a spot in Los Angeles County that people have always made

things. And I'd not just at a workshop manufacturing sense, it's a place where people have viewed

the world in a very almost classically American western. Like if I can imagine it, I can make it

sort of thing. So we started out with standard oils, second refinery in California, which is the

biggest refiner on the west coast. And they put that right here on the dunes overlooking the ocean,

and from that engineering talent, and that sort of can-do spirit evolved a robust aircraft

industry, and then from aircraft to space, and all of the things that go around that, all of the

who's going to do the wiring harnesses, who's going to make the assemblies, who's going to make

the fittings, all of those sorts of innovations have just grown and grown and grown,

and with it, the technological talent just attracts more talent. So we went from basically being a

place that was sending 6 million gallons of jet fuel a day to LAX to a place that now be a birth

SpaceX and Varta space and beyond meat, and we host major sports teams. It's a really dynamic

place, but what undergirds is sort of irrespective of ethnicity, race, place of origin, state of

origin. I mean, I'm a rooster of Kansas, right? What unites this place is the very cultural sense of

we're in this together to make new things. So one of the cool things, so for layman's perspective,

or at least in artillery marine, I think we're standing on a roof at a party, and then like the

so one side of El Segundo is the refinery complex, and then the other side is LAX,

and then sort of the west side is the ocean, and the east side is LA proper, or some of the other

cities, is that is that a fair assessment? Yeah, to orient to the map, if you if you fly into LA,

you're typically going to land aimed at the ocean, right? LAX aimed at the ocean, and to your right

is Marina Del Rey and Venice Beach and that Santa Monica and sort of your classic city of Los Angeles

stuff on the left of the beach cities. So you'd look down the beach and see Manhattan Beach and

Hermosa and Redondo, but right next to you right on the left, what do you lay it is El Segundo,

and it is totally contained between the ocean, the refinery, the airport, and then behind us,

you sort of spill out into Hawthorne and then the city of Los Angeles, but we have that logistical

advantage of being right in the heart of things. We have two heavy gauge railroads, we have two

freeways coming in and out, we used to have a port. Now the port is just just services the

the super tankers for the refinery. The port is is now in Long Beach and the port of LA,

but we are logistically located centrally that has always sort of attracted or you can kind of

start here in Los Angeles. You can arrive and really start here. If you're coming from Asia,

you will start right here. And for like the for those of us out here and we think of places that

have refineries and others, we're like, well, I wouldn't want to live. I wouldn't want to live or

hang out in any of those places, but what's really interesting about El Segundo, it's actually nice.

You know, it's like nice houses and nice downtown and nice restaurants and nice places to go. So

again, the the eastern idea of a refinery area is not really a posh place if you will,

but but but El Segundo seems to be doing something completely different how it's laid out and

set up. Was it always like that? Well, yeah, well, I think if you can imagine it, right,

people say, look, we want to live next to refinery. How do we do that? And I think part of it is

working with the refinery if it's completely ringed by air monitors, high and air monitors. So at

any time, you can check air quality. We do a lot of emergency management preparation for them.

It runs quietly. It runs cleanly. It runs smoothly. It is well landscaped so you don't have to stare

at parts you don't want to stare at. But that is just really an elemental piece of, you know,

you can shake your fisted things and say it's going to be gross or you can say, how do we make this

something that is enhances our quality of life? And we have a great partner in it. I think there

are a few spots in California that have done that very, very well. There's some that I think

probably approach it and something that you or I might have remembered as sort of a classic,

I guess we're talking in sort of stereotypical pieces like your classic East Coast. I live next

to the steel mill. Here's what the steel mill will look like. Right. We just approach it differently.

And it's and it's sustainable. Again, it's like a place that you would go even if you weren't

working at one of those firms or whatever, like it would be a great place to stop before you

get on a flight back east is to go to have dinner and else a gundo before you catch your red eye.

Yeah. It looks and it would be people sort of joke that it's may vary by the sea. But the joke

lands because it's true. I made it is a main street that could have teleported in from 1950.

Just add a lot of fiber optic cable to it and Wi-Fi. But you know, the buildings are very intentionally

maintained in a way that reflects sort of the way people want to live. And it is, you know, it

attracts like any place that has a strong culture that attracts people who are attracted to that

culture, which kind of reinforces it. I tend to joke that as a city, we are a city with very few

rules, but a tremendous amount of norms and the norms of how people treat one another in the sense

of volunteerism. We can run a very lean city staff because people volunteer their time to do things.

I don't have to contract out to pick up a litter because no one litters. I don't have to have

city staff run little league because little league runs itself. The soccer teams run itself. The

parents run things here and run it effectively. It was taken by the cleanliness too. That is,

that is definitely something that you realize when you're driving around the streets of El Segundo.

That is a, it's not only not, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really well appointed in that

respect. I mean, pride of pride of place is a thing. People here, they love the fact that people

build things and innovate. And innovators love the fact that it's a neat clean town. So even if you

are making someone that is a really dirty industry, if you're making your propulsion system,

right, it's good oil and grease and hydrazine, whatever. People clean it up because they won't,

because they want the city to be the city they like. Yeah, they take care of it. There is, so that's

kind of a good segue into, you know, you, you're the leader of the city, the city government,

of the municipal government. And you do take a very, I mean, you just describe kind of a stewardship

model. That's right. That's right. This is not, I do not pretend and, and no surprise to you because

you've known me a long time. I'm not the world's most creative guy. And, and I think that suits a

city like this that, that we have a, a grand tradition of wonderful mayors who, who, who, in

wonderful city council people and wonderful city staff that don't show up to try and reinvent ideas.

They do the things that, that in a classic governmental sense, governments are here to do,

which is provide a safe and reasonably well-organized society.

Okay. Are you term limited or are, are city council members term limited?

No, you know, we're not. We're not. I think that like any place you have to, don't be the last

guy at the party, right? No, when you've overstayed. That's part of the delicability,

because it is intoxicatingly fun to be involved in all of the cool things the city does. I mean,

it's, it's wonderful. You also have to know when it's time for, for some fresh voices and,

and fresh ideas. So speaking of that, you're bringing in a ton of people across various sectors.

You've got some national security, some space, some, some, you know, hard tech. Give us a, give us

a feel of, you know, who's showing up to El Segundo and who's looking to hang a shingle out

in El Segundo, because it seems to, again, this is, again, it's evident when you're walking around.

This is a growing, thriving place that people are flocking to that want to be a part of this

they want to be, they want to be on the in here in town. What's, who are they? And then let's,

let's go from there. Yeah, I'll give a, like a two-second history snapshot to give a little bit

of context for people that the city when it started a rally oil refinery, and then a hundred years

ago, for rapidly. Then in the nighties we had, you know, Howard Hughes and Alan Lockheed and

Alan Bowing and Jack Northrup and these guys show up. It's, hey, we could build planes here,

prevailing winds, good technical talent coming out of the refinery. So this sort of air industry

was created and it thrived all the way through the Cold War and was joined by the space industry.

We had a, a significant contraction that followed the, the peace depot end when the Cold War ended.

So the city topped out at about 17,000 people in 1970 and then shrank with some partly due to

some tax reform in California. At the end of the Cold War, we're at about 13,000 people.

But we still had this industrial base and a lot of facilities that were permitted in to do that.

And that's where SpaceX started. And as SpaceX grew and matured in 2000, 2007, 2008,

they had the big inflection point with, with government support. They grew rapidly and then

as I matured, it started calving off some high-end engineers. And those engineers were joined by

the talent that already existed around Northrup and Lockheed and, and these companies to form

these new companies. So we had this sort of key base that goes in. So now we'll fast forward a bit

to, to the start of the pandemic. The city was clearing out a bit. We have people who were staying

away because people weren't coming to the office. And we as a city staff and city government,

we're looking to, to, to sort of combat that. Because that's a big part of our tech space.

So we went to Silicon Valley. We started talking to a lot of the venture funds. Instead of you have

groups that are, try, if you have innovators who are not doing software and they're not doing

crypto. If you have people who really want to make things, we've got room, we've got space,

and we have this key piece of town. And we had some really key players come in. And I'll highlight

Varta space because Varta gave us a key data point when they moved into town. If they had

drawn an algorithm or created an algorithm that's aware, can I find the highest density of Ph.D.

engineers in California. Number one was Silicon Valley. Number two was El Segundo.

We played on that pitch. And we've started all of these people who, with venture being

willing to invest in dual use technologies. Something that the only, the only customer will no longer

just be the government. It can be a, it can go into space on a space, a space, a space,

six rocket, a really supercharged, the amount of innovators we have down here. So we've got about

$5.8 billion in venture investment in El Segundo since 2021. And with that, we've seen the population

rebound here. I think I should have said, well, we're building airplanes heavily in the 80s,

90,000 people would come to work every day in El Segundo on top of the 13,000 who lived here.

Now we get about 55 to 70,000 come to work here every day, but we're back up to about 17,100 people

and demographically younger people. So that's some of the energy that you and I saw on that rooftop.

It was just packed with people who were, who were, who have dreams of whether it's a new radar,

a new UAS system, a new on-orbit capability. Let's talk with a guy last night. And he's got a

solar panel that's about two microns thick. I mean, if you think of that, that is what,

160th the width of a human hair. Yeah.

With these remarkable sheets of aluminum. And those are the sorts of people that are coming in here.

It's a rich, really remarkable. I don't want to be able to long before you get your next

question, but that is on top of, that is not our only industry, right? I mean, this is America's

toy capital, 200 toy companies. So when you think about like, you know, starting up businesses and

moving your business someplace, a lot of times you're going to run into the obstacles and the

bureaucracy and the red tape that comes with setting up and El Segundo has taken a really

revolutionary approach. Their orientation is completely different from a lot of places.

I'm sure you could add some color on maybe compared to other places in California,

but certainly across the states, you don't hear about speed being part of the process for companies

moving or building something in the town. What's, what's, tell us about that.

Yeah, I think for us, this goes a bit to our overarching view of book government is here to do.

And so for that with book, we provide services police fire, you know, the plans,

plan check permitting to do those. We want to tax you as little as possible. We want to justify

all of those spend. So our tax plan is based on how many employees you have and how big your,

your building is. That's what it takes us to provide services with that. We don't tax gross

receipts or we don't tax your revenue to take it. We don't, I think uniquely in California,

we treat our businesses like ATMs. We treat them as partners who we want to succeed.

We have a really, I know everybody says their staff is great. Our staff is great. I mean,

they understand the culture of the city that they're in. When someone wants to come up with an idea,

they're happily say, what do we need to do to make this safe? And if it's safe? And if it works,

then we're going to get out of your way. And I know I shared this story on the roof with you.

I wouldn't guys show up with a bag of yellow cake uranium. So hey, there's nothing in your city code

that regulates uranium. Can I use this? And nobody panics, I said, okay, well, I mean,

we want to make sure that's 238. That's less radioactive than bananas. It's a stable isotope.

But that underscores the way we approach things. And it's a, how do we get to yes? And if there's

a real issue, if there's a, if there's a no, we want to highlight that. If someone wants to do

energetics and test bombs, we probably can't do that. We can do the R and D piece. We can do

the digital twins. We can do the modeling and those things. But if you want to do that,

here are some suggestions we can make for them. Here's where China Lake is. There's Arizona.

Those sorts of pieces, but as a city, we try to work quickly. We don't have undue delays. We

provide lots of almost consultative support. Where if someone has an idea, they just want to bounce

office. We can say, look, this is this is what we think will work and this probably won't

and really help people get their their idea off the ground or not the ground quickly. And I will add

I will add, you know, the city council, the way it is laid out has a five different sort of,

well, four different expertise is in me who's an expert of none, but which are super helpful.

I mean, we have a, but the mere pro tem is at land use, right? Well, then it's a land use

attorney. Like he can provide some some really good insight. The former mayor is a credible entrepreneur,

right? He can talk about the challenges of doing things in California and a way that resonates with

people who are starting things. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting speed becomes your strategic edge,

right? You're, you're oriented effectively and downstream from an effective orientation is

speed and you're able to get people in there quickly. Well, and the speed, the speed is enabled by

the speed is enabled by transparency and predictability because people know there's not,

do not dealing with a fickle and variable government. Yeah. That speed is enabled by that predictability

that helps us that positions us, right? Is a, is a, is a orientation on the battlefield that's

really successful and resonates? It's not so mean, you know, at the name names, but I mean,

I imagine that a company that's going to start up, they look at a list of, yeah, they probably

have a slate of candidate places where they want to set up or whatever. You know, what are some of

the success stories that also got no edge somebody out? I imagine the, the, the ability to permit fast

and get things done quickly. I imagine that's a massive edge on top of the other things that you,

you mentioned. I mean, it seems like that clearly there's a, you know, the tracks are already

laid from an environmental standpoint to, to be there, but what would have, would have been some

of the scenarios where, you know, a company would be like, I'm going to look at five cities and,

yeah, we, we chose El Segundo because, yeah, I think that what's, what's really interesting in

one of the, the, the difficult challenges of being a small city is knowing your role. So we

over-represented and I'll, I'll, I'll use a, an imperfect parallel here with, with Dubai. Dubai is

a very small place. It's not resource rich in and of itself, although the Emirates have some

resources, they over-represented themselves in regional bodies and they over-represented themselves

at the UN because they want to be able to guide their future a bit. So we over-represented

in regional bodies and that allows us to almost be a coordination point from some of our bigger,

bigger neighbors, Englewood, Long Beach on the other side. And that provides us a unique

piece with our business. Come back to it to a place and when people choose a place, we're

happy to engage with a company and say, here is our part of your ecosystem. I'll use VAST as an

example. VAST, which builds, which is building private space stations. VAST has a piece in El Segundo.

So I hate, we're going to start in El Segundo, but as they grow, you know, we don't try to hold

them hostage to find them a bigger facility in El Segundo. If they are, we know once they need

150,000 square feet, I can't probably provide that, but we're happy to work with them as they go

to Torrance or their budget to Long Beach for a much larger facility and we coordinate with

those other cities. So part of what I think when someone chooses a location, they know they

get from us apart from the sort of speed and predictability is also a little bit of the honest

broker that we're here to be a little bit of a mentor in a way or a facilitator of your growth.

And in that, we're very clear about what our piece is, like you will not find a more dense,

talent location. So we have a company right now, I don't want to use their name without

the permission, but they went to New Mexico to grow because it's cheaper and they could test things

out there, but the density of talent wasn't there to facilitate all the things they needed.

So they came back, like they moved back, they would want to come back into El Segundo to this piece,

we're not going to be there long because we hope to grow and we're just happy to have that

conversation with them. Like, yeah, well, let's get your back off the ground here and they can

regrow again at a place with all of the sort of amenities and service providers and auxiliary

talent that you need to really take. I mean, the tempo that you have is really good because,

I guess, I think that stewardship model is highly adaptive and then you create an environment

that's frictionless, either to come there or to return to El Segundo, an example that you just gave.

Yeah, to go to a bit to our maneuverist roots, right? You can't fall in love with your plan.

If you fall in love with your plan, you are creating an enabling friction, right? You will never be

able to reorient this, you know, Franklin, which is our street around, which a ton of these

smaller innovators live. In 2018, we thought that would all be creative office. Like, look,

we're going to have designers come in. We're going to people doing SaaS platforms. We want to

enable this as creative office. We quickly flexed off of that. We didn't fall in love with the plan.

You know, we reoriented around what the market demand was and what our specialty was and just

reinforced that to your point like avoiding friction. That's a, that is, the friction is often

self-created by saying, this is my system. And if your system isn't perfect, you have to be able to

flex off of it. That's the, that's the big word, right? So we say all the time, you know, systems

drive behaviors. And if punch was here, it's exactly what he would say, you know, systems drive

behaviors. And I think that that's really the thing to point out is what you're leading in

El Segundo is the creation of a very adaptive infrastructure that's allowing not only

of citizens to thrive, but those that they host or collaborate with or partner with through the

companies that are doing business there. We'll be right back.

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I will say there will always be challenges on the public sector and municipal side, because unlike

I can't task organized in the same way you would be able to inhibit your battalion. You can't

reshuffle and say, I'm going to do with this mobility. I'm going to do this with my reconnaissance,

it'll do this with my weapons company. You just don't have that ability because the roles are

defined in California. It's a unionized environment. The employees of the city are unionized,

and those union roles have left and right limits. I can control that level of organization,

and I can't always control the tasking, but I think what is this city we have always done,

and I'm just the latest curator of, is you can control the sort of the ethos, the maneuver

statement, what's our final result desired? You can continue to reorient around that,

even if some of your systems will have some friction built in because of the job roles.

What do you think are the biggest components of that? Where citizens have had the buy-in,

maybe they had seen the end of the Cold War, and they'd seen it kind of slowed down,

and now they're seeing the, you know, you used on a video I'd seen. It's like a renaissance,

like you're building a renaissance there. How have people generally reacted to that?

I mean, my sense of having been there and seen it, I'm like, everybody's pretty into this.

Yeah, it's like I said, the cultural dynamic is very forward looking in that regard,

then I think that the things that you have to guard against are the people become enamored

with the extra year a bit, and so you have to say, look, this aspect of our lives may change,

this one aspect of life, and that might be that there'll be a restaurant over here,

or I think we joked about we got rid of our pool table ordinance.

To allow more places to have two pool tables in the same spot, but if the value system and

that culture remains consistent and people are assured that you are defending that, then you can

move ahead with the other aspects. It can be very seductive for people generally, but government

and specific to try and be too deterministic on the future. Like, oh, I could predict it,

it looks like this, so we're going to reorient around our concept of the future.

I just don't think that's always the right answer, because unknowable in a market environment,

you have to reorient around possibilities and reorient around your cultural and hate-the-term

north star, your cultural north stars, and then let the development around it be things that

you can shake to your best of your ability, but largely reorient around and then make decisions

based on what pops up. Other than space defense, what are some other industries,

other than the refinery, what are some other industries, maybe in the non-defense sector or whatever

that are taking hold or looking at coming there? We are the only city in America with four major

sports teams. We're the only city in America with three major sports teams. We're home to the

Lakers, the L.A. Kings, the Chargers, and the L.A. Sparks. We'll be moving here. We also have

rugby, World Surfing League. We'll just move, but they'll be back. Those sorts of amenity

pieces. Part of that honestly is the advantage of twofold. This is going to sound

I don't want to bore you to pieces. We're in the middle of a giant area that has research universities,

right? UCLA, USC, Caltech, all those things are around here, right? We get both engineering,

talent out of that, but also biomedical talent. We host UCLA and USC Health, and with those

facilities, the sports teams come with that. The sports teams like our proximity to the airport,

are they like the ease of doing business with us, building a facility, because those are unique

kinds of facilities. We do that much faster than anyone else. The Chargers facility went up

in a year, and that's $125 million facility. It was in literally Raytheon's parking lot.

Satellites being built over here and a FL team over here. So those parts, we have those. We are

America's toy capital. I said we have 200 toy companies because we have where the creative

economy of the West Coast, all the design and purchasing and creation. You know,

Prince will be started from Mattel, and I'll show my barbeque. But also the the East Asian

manufacturing prowess needs a place to meet them, and we're better than Los Angeles, right? It's

the short it's 11 hour flight. Come over here and we become the nexus for those things. We have

some robust biotech, not a huge piece, but a pretty robust one, particularly because we're by the

the airports of samples can get in and out on airplanes faster. And we also will be hosting the

eSports World Cup, which is incredibly exciting. It's a gigantic industry, but we were selected

over Riyadh to those the eSports World Cup. So it's a there's there's just lots of interesting things.

It'll be on meat, right? Maybe on meat, which I love, you know, it's it was founded here. So

literally beyond meat was founded in the same dance studio that later became Pico Grid,

which is a great defense startup and is now a host yet another startup at it. I mean, the sort of

dynamism is amazing. Mike Tyson's wheat brand used to be based here in a very small office,

which turned over became Castellan, which is successful, missile business, which became fast,

which is space, or space station business. It's a really dynamic place and industries of various

stripes come in here. What's some, you know, I'm building a startup or, you know, I'm looking

to move. Tell me about Vision 2050, you know, Vision 2050, one of the interesting spots, you know,

city governance, we have to organize land use. And historically, imagine a quilt and it's like,

this will be commercial office, this will be industrial, this will be research and development.

In 2050, we're taking a novel approach to this and our zoning is going to be

concept based. We think we're testing this out. Let's let it fight this, but have areas where we can

list, you know, this is the kind of thing we want to accomplish here. Now, there'll be a few uses

we don't want, you know, we don't want to do like, I'll beat up on doggy daycares. I love doggy day,

I really love dogs, but doggy daycares are cash cows. They're loud. They're not great neighbors,

because they're loud and they're hard to get rid of because of cash cows. So there might be

something that we don't want in there, but instead of trying to say this will only be commercial

office, instead would say we want something we're open to businesses here that are dynamic and

accomplish the following outputs. So that'll be a really interesting take on how a city does its

general plans. And he's typically do those every 10 or 20 years. It'll be our first take on

trying to be less late touch on before less predictive and deterministic about what we want,

because otherwise you become inflexible, right? You add the friction, which is which if I add friction,

my, my comedy in Closewitz and Heinz Guderian t-shirts will be taken. Well, we should close with

that. I've never really closed just yet. Never close with the very mocked. Don't close with the

very mocked. I was just thinking for the listeners that follow our work here and read our

sub-stack and our clients that bring us into their companies. I mean, you're a really good example

of someone in an industry, in a sector, a government showing that these concepts that we teach

actually work. And they can work only where humans make decisions and humans make decisions in

municipalities just as well as they do inside of a hedge fund, inside of a manufacturing company,

inside of anywhere else. You're dialing into that. And hopefully what you learned, because that's

what I'm trying to do, what I learned, starting on the steamy plains of Quantico and Brownfield,

you're putting those concepts to really good use. And you're showing that this dynamic does

does work. And I imagine not everybody that you work with and that you partner with has any

military experience. And they're able to leverage the benefits of these ideas and how they work

in real time. Well, look, I think on that, and obviously they're imperfect allegories. But,

you know, you do want to know when to commit to reserve, right? Re-enforce the main effort that

if our main effort is make, if we have a point time where we are making things, and I'll use this,

we have companies coming over who are innovative in starting this few years ago. And we have

something that's really taking off. And we see this as a main effort piece. Well, all the sudden

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed or retrenched at the time. Silicon Valley Bank provided all manner

of services bespoke to startups, right? They could they could help you with treasury service,

help you find a lawyer, help you find a realtor, all those things. Suddenly we have all these,

you know, 25 year old starting businesses who are bereft of those sorts of services. So this is

in military parlance, we kind of committed the reserve. Like we flooded that and said, look,

we cannot give you recommendations of who to use for these services. But here are a list of

people that we know in the area that do it. So you can continue to work on what you work on.

And if you need advice or attorneys or realtors, here are some things so we can fill that gap.

So in sort of military parlance, like we kind of committed our reserve and then to reinforce

the main effort. And it was successful. But of course, anytime you commit your reserve,

committed your reserve. So you know, it's a matter of you lose some flexibility. And at the time,

we did and we had some concern about doing it, but it has worked. Tell everybody listening to that,

if you want to, you know, go into an infrastructure that's innovating, you also want to have one

that's financially strong, you know, paint that picture because you guys have done really amazing

things in that respect. You know, it is it is I go so I will dovetail off that when you come into

reserve, you lose a little bit of flexibility and have to quickly reconstitute it, right? So you

have that flexibility on on the field. We had seen, you know, the lesson of the of the 90s here

was when the Cold War ended in the peace dividend, compared to all of a sudden, we had enormous

contraction in our defense sector. And you could argue that the city was a lot was somewhat over

committed to one source of revenue, which was which was making airplanes and space spacings for

the government. So when I bring up the toy industry pivoting and understanding that there was a gap

in how the toy global toy industry was working, it's traditionally based in New York, people weren't

going to New York after COVID, but they tried Dallas and it wasn't attracting sort of the global

populace in the same way. So we went to the toy industry and they approached us initially with

a concept and we grabbed the hold of it and said, look, these are ways that we can anchor and continue

to diversify our economy. Now, these are things that we can add. It's the same reason we've looked

at biotech to when we look, these are other things in life sciences that can happen here because we

are continually trying to reduce our risk, you know, de-risk the battlefield a bit by having a

diverse and robust economy. So if any one of those suffers a significant retraction, we'll be a

little bit more durable. If you commit, if you commit the reserve and culminate, like that's the

worst, you could have to reserve and hit the culminating point and then you can no longer reconstitutes.

No, and I mean, you know, we do have other people that listen this from the investing world,

you know, AAA, AAA rated city. So it's amazing the city that's financially stable.

It didn't start that way. I will tell you when 2018, when I was elected, we had a $63

million general fund, basically a 5% reserve and a $483 million pension obligation that was

unfunded. That doing that work, you know, in parallel to shore up the finances of the city and

close that pension liability piece. Some of that is really a lot of hard, hard staff work and frankly

some political risk that we had to take to build our roadmap out of that financial hole. You know,

now our general fund is about $107 million. We have 25% reserve and we have a structurally balanced

budget and we've even doubt that that pension obligation. So instead of taking 40% of our general

fund by 2028, which was going to do now is just a flat nine million dollar a year fee that we pay

that seven seven and a half percent of our general fund until 2038 and we'll be out of it.

Building that, I mean, that's the classic, I guess we're to use more military stuff. I mean,

that's that's doing the sit-ups and the push-ups and the pull-ups and the running at home to make

sure that, you know, you are able to fight the fight you want. You know, that's the that's a training

and that's the kid. What did we say? Training is good. The continuous trainer. What did

the term for that? What do we have? Now on the swathe term, a pint on blood or whatever.

No, there was one of those that's like a continuing operation. That's a continuing operation, right?

Yeah, I was the building's continuing operation. How is it continuing operation?

Cha was continuous. Yeah, that's the school prudence as a continuing operation and also gun,

though, I think. Look, it's it's not easy because there's always someone with a good idea that

especially once once you restore physical probity, people see that as as dry powder like, hey,

we can put this here and you have to be disciplined as a city and say, these are what cities do.

As a small city, we have a luxury that we don't do a lot of social stuff, right? That's the county

kind of takes care of that social programming, but you have to be disciplined because there's always

a good idea of where to spend that they can get your trouble. Well, we'll bring it home. I know you

gotta keep your schedule moving out there. Where would you die? I would tell everybody that's

listening when you're in LA, go to El Segundo, go grab coffee, go to or go to some of the restaurants,

look around, drive around, you will be blown away, which is also too fascinating for someone

that lives in Manhattan, the sun shines in El Segundo. And I had to say at least once, I did not

leave my wallet there when I went there. There's another Gen X reference. Where was you

where do people need to go? What websites are there any initiatives that you have that people could

check out? Yeah, so El Segundo Business. So if you go to El Segundo.org, which is our web page,

there's a series of very helpful links. And if you're curious about the business environment,

it will take you right over our business page and give you both the lab, the land, what the

zones are, the permits, what the costs are, who to contact. And if you reach out, we will respond.

So there's things that we try to make easy for you, besides the fact that we don't charge for

parking. Yeah, well, because as you know, I was driving all over greater Los Angeles, those days

that I was out there, and I really did feel like like El Segundo, I mean, I get on bias because

you're, you know, we've been friends for so long, but I'm like, wow, this is really like an oasis,

like this is really different than everybody else, everywhere else I was. So I wanted to leave

that when they get it, you know, I'm from, I know I've told you this, but I tell my parents,

like, El Segundo is, is how Kansas thinks it acts. Like it's so nice. It's just so nice.

All right, Mayor Chris Pimentel, the mayor of El Segundo, California, thanks for coming on

no way out. And thanks for showing us how job boys who to lose sketch even works in municipal

government. It works. It works. Moves thanks for having me as always. Guy, you look great,

you're aging and reverse. I know we go to the same barber, you know, we go to the same barber,

but it looks like you go to a better gym or have a better cook at home. I will tell you one thing,

I showed the one picture that we took to a lot of people, they're like, you two aren't related,

are you like, they thought we were cousins, you know, but anyway, you know, we'll stop.

I was in portuguese I was in Puerto Rican, it's right. And I was in portuguese and I was in Puerto Rican,

they, they have, I have a, I have a somewhat of a height advantage over you, but we do kind of look

like cousins. So anyway, all right. I don't know. Take care. We'll stop the recording. Thanks

so much, Chris. All right. Thanks, miss. That's all for this episode of no way out. We thank you

for listening and we hope you enjoyed the conversation. Make sure you check out the show notes for links

to people, ideas and things discussed in each episode. As always, we want to thank our guests as

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and we'll catch you in the next episode of no way out.

I can eliminate the features just sighted. Well, a lot of them though. We don't know how to do this.

So we're going to have to be a next one. This order is what we got. It's called my tail.

Tail. Tail. Tail. We want to get a map that we're going to act in. It's going to tell the

voices we do. We're doing a best match. We can't call it that. We're here in England,

to listen to this in your dead.

The ambiguity helps make adjustments to adapt to adjust to the world.

If you look at it, take several points of view.

On the other hand, many sides have put some cross-currency process on projection

and for the correlation and rejection.