Welcome to Perspectives online and on air from WFSU Public Media I'm Tom Flanigan this program using zoom pre-recorded on Tuesday January 12th for playback on Thursday January 14th to appear both on WFSU fm and also the WFSU Public Media Facebook page that has a lot of great goodies on it it's something you really need to check out if you are a Facebook connoisseur it's always new content going up continuously well this past Friday in case you missed it a uh well-known Tallahassee reported for his last day of work before heading off into a well-deserved retirement and that story in and of itself may not be you know a real big deal in fact it's pretty routine uh but the person in question is by no means a routine kind of guy because since the mid-1980s Dave Bruns has been a prominent personality in the capital city uh capital bureau chief with the Tallahassee uh democrat from 85 through 91 and then kind of kicked upstairs to associate editor uh with the democrat senatorial board between 91 and 96. then off into as our good friend Rick Oppenheim often refers to at the dark side he became director of communications with the Florida Department of Elder Affairs in 96 and held that for a couple years and then off to the office of public information for DOR the Florida department of revenue from 98 to 2005 and then most recently communication manager for AARP Florida from 2005 until this past Friday when he shuffled off into retirement and he uh who knows we'll find out what might lie ahead for Dave Bruns as we go through the hour and welcome him to Perspectives Dave it is good to see you you survived the retirement party I'm so happy yes absolutely it was uh my my teammates at AARP gave me a great send-off I have to say okay and now you get to sleep in a little bit of what 6 45 the alarm won't offer I should say the horses went off at 6 45 that's exactly right the uh the the uh the people are happy to uh to sleep in but the horses are like what the heck's going on isn't it time to get fed well yeah you also have a wonderful persona as a life partner to uh Linda Kleindings to Brunswick many people remember from her uh long contributions to the journalistic uh trenches and which she labored for low many years but let's go back even before your appearance here locally with the uh with the Tallahassee democrat and we'll talk about journalism uh throughout the hour I'm sure but talk about your your start now I i see some Missouri in your background what uh what's the deal on that so I was uh born and raised in a very small town kind of in the middle of nowhere in uh in rural Missouri and in the high school basketball season of 1968-69 the basketball coach asked me if I was willing to call a guy in Kansas City I called the fellow and um and he said you know we need a stringer to cover high school sports um we want you to cover you know like a three or four county area call these uh coaches get the scores get the rundown on the game you know write up a brief and and phone it in to their rewrite desk so my very first job in journalism at age 15 uh was to actually speak the words hello sweetheart get me rewrite oh yes I remember the the let's see that was the from the front page as I recall it was it exactly was and it was a famous poster in the 1970s in uh in journalism uh I'm I'm somewhat dating myself just a little bit that was uh several months ago I think like 600 or well I remember seeing that very poster if I am not mistaken in the newsroom of the Tallahassee democrat in somebody's cubicle there was that very poster that you're referring to there in the days of uh hard uh editors and and rewrite people as you mentioned the city desk was always a screaming hotbed of activity especially his deadline neared every night well but what got you at first I believe into a journalism program academically after reporting all those high school basketball games there and then into your first newspaper job how did that occur well my aunt had told me David you know if you're going to make a living you're really going to have to do it using your mouth um and it may have been a little pejorative the way she put it but yes I thought she was on to something so um uh I love to write and uh I love to report and I love to I love the independence of journalism in those days and so um uh I went to the university of Missouri uh I was at the university of Missouri only about a week um and I i met a guy by the name of Ray Hartman uh who later became editor-in-chief of the of the globe democrat and another fellow by the name of Jeff Gluff who became the publisher and so um they had set up a campus newspaper that was off campus called the campus courier and they hired me as a reporter they actually paid me uh I believe the starting salary was uh 15 bucks a week which was which was about 50 cents an hour um uh but it was still it was you know I was getting paid I was working uh stories I was writing stories um after the first year or so they essentially staged a campus revolt and took over the man eater the the university of Missouri student newspaper and I went with them to the man eater I was eventually assistant managing editor of of the man eater I got into journalism school I worked at Columbia uh Missourian daily newspaper uh graduated in 1975 and uh sent off all of my resumes um in the in the uh the winter of 1974 75 which was a recession sent out 400 um sets of clips to newspapers I got four replies all of which were no and I ended up working at a toaster factory for about um um about six months and it was it was very depressing having gone through j school you know working at a toaster factory but um one night um one afternoon I got a call from a weekly publisher um a guy who ran a newspaper in Shelby, Missouri and he hired me for the princely salary of 85 a week which was a pay cut from the toaster factory um but it was in journalism and so I worked for that outfit for a couple of years and got into small dailies and the little bigger dailies and then the south Florida sun sentinel where I met Linda um and then she got promoted to um the capital bureau in Tallahassee and I quit without a job came to Tallahassee and we were in Tallahassee only about two weeks when bill fuller at the democrat took mercy on me and uh and gave me a job as uh what they called a rim rat in those days I was um a line editor uh on the city desk um and worked at that job for you know several months and then I was regional editor I was in charge of some freelancers and and young reporters who covered the outlying areas and then I went to the capitol bureau uh worked for Neil Chatwick who was my bureau chief at the time um then Neil left I became capital bureau chief as you say I went on to the to the editorial board and then on to uh I see I don't think I ever had a job where I was on the quote-unquote dark side the organizations that I was fortunate enough to work for in public information and public relations were pretty much white hat outfits department of elder affairs is a great organization with a great mission department of revenue is one of the best run state agencies anywhere in America and AARP is a great outfit to work for it's uh has a noble mission well we will talk about again the transition that you made even though it's not so much a transition as perhaps some folks in journalism who had to go into a uh an organization with which they may have had some major philosophical and even moral disagreements which I know has been you know we've talked about that in in journalism programs for years and years what happens when you have to make that that adjustment if you will but when you joined the democrat back there in the mid-80s Dave um which I believe is the period some people might refer to as the golden era of the democrat when Knight Ridder was essentially running a cash cow in Tallahassee Florida because I had a little insight into that when my wife became just for oh maybe six months a an advertising assistant for the democrat and um I was working at a commercial radio station that is now in the location of Novi Animal Hospital there at Magnolia and Tennessee street I would get off shift before she did and I would wander from the station over to the democrat I'd let myself in through that door by the break room in on the side of the building there facing the parking lot and their Knight Ridder had posted the revenue and profit figures for each of its papers whether it was the Miami Herald or the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Tallahassee democrat and the democrat was persistently towards the very top of that echelon there and I'd wander in and say hi to my wife she'd throw me out because she was on deadline and I go over into the newsroom where I first met people uh like bill fuller and Ron Hartung and um you know the uh the great capital curmudgeon Bill Cotterell l and I would usually get there about the time that the deadline push was beginning and to my way of thinking it was one of the most exciting fascinating things I'd ever seen Tallahassee not a big city but this room filled with people as the tension began to build towards that deadline period people screaming sometimes throwing things um epithets flying back and forth I thought I was in heaven it was a wonderful place to be was that your experience when you were back there in those days absolutely it was it was um um daily journalism daily newspaper journalism at the time was um a paradise for people like me um it was uh kind of the island of misfit toys it was it was a great um uh shelter from the real world it was the job was pretty much all consuming it consumed all of your emotional and and and mental energy energy uh it was draining um uh 10 12 14 hour days there were days when I was covering the state capitol where I would go into work at at seven in the morning and come home at um after dark the following day so you know it was um uh very intense but it was um uh it was a noble mission and remains a noble mission and journalism is absolutely essential to the maintenance of a free republic in my opinion do you think that there are however adequate resources being put into journalism at all levels today to maintain that especially when you have sometimes more how should we say intransigent state and federal and even local governmental agencies to deal with it used to be you remember when you called I don't care if it was a Tallahassee city commissioner or the governor of Florida uh if your name was attached to a major news outlet someone would get back to you usually within the hour today that doesn't happen so much no um but you have to remember uh Tom journalism whether it's it's uh daily newspapers weekly newspapers um radio television online it doesn't really matter it's a business that the resources come from the business the business is able to be independent an independent voice and serve the purpose that the founders envisioned only because it's profitable once it no longer becomes as profitable or or unprofitable then its independence is fatally undermined uh the first the one of the first big stories I ever broke was a a weekly newspaper in Missouri um and just let me tell you this story because it kind of underlines the point um the publisher of that paper was a fellow by the name of Carter Blanton and carter was a very colorful character shall we say um uh he sent me to cover the Sharbina Missouri city council because he'd heard that there was something up something that nobody really knew what was going on so I showed up at the city council meeting and started about 7 p.m and they said sorry we're going into executive session so you're going to have to leave they were allowed under Missouri law to exclude the news media and the members of the public from any executive session especially when they're considering personnel matters so you know I dutifully uh gathered up my notebook and I went outside the the city commit council chamber was on the second floor and right next door there was a one-story auto repair place and it was summertime and they had the windows open and the auto repair place had a ladder i climbed up onto the roof of the outer repair place sat underneath those windows and took copious notes while the city council enacted a two million dollar bond issue to build a new sewer plant which was strictly illegal to do in executive session I didn't bother checking with members of the city council after the meeting as soon as they held the vote I scrambled down the uh the ladder went to the paper that was a Wednesday night the next morning the local paper carried a headline six columns across the front page city council votes illegally for two million dollar bond issue which was absolutely true four members of city commission city council who own bit large businesses and who were advertised with paper showed up that afternoon in a meeting with me and carter and they said you're going to run a retraction next week or we're pulling our advertising and we're never coming back and carter said well this is my town nobody tells me what to do with my newspaper in my town take your ads try to sell your goods without me you'll be back and I'll be happy to welcome you back and we never have to talk about this again now get out of my office within two months they were all back and we never spoke about it again but three out of the four got defeated in the next election that independence that carter showed was possible only because carter owned that paper free and clear he owned his own press he had a year's worth of newsprint in storage he had a good supply of advertisers who were going to be with him regardless he could tell those four guys to hell with you I don't need you you need me that's what the independence of the press is founded on carter was profitable but in today's corporate journalism where the bottom line and shareholder value and all of these priorities have become even more critical to these organizations is that kind of courage and independence still even possible it's it's extremely difficult and it's difficult not because the the fundamental principles are the wrong principles it's because in too often these these companies are heavily leveraged very often you know some hedge fund manager acquires um uh these major publishing companies um they've piled up a mountain of debt to acquire that business they're largely interested in the real estate not in the journalistic mission not even in the advertising and the business model for daily newspapers is you know frankly way out of date um so people get their news online and they should the question is how do we maintain a vigorous a vigorous press that's independent and that is has the credibility to be accepted by people of all persuasions all ideologies the entire ideological spectrum believes that when the associated press says a is a it really is a it's not b or z and and that is um you know the fundamental question that's a question that bears directly on our ability to keep the republic that the founders gave us in my opinion is there anything beyond just symbolism and the fact that your former stomping ground down there on magnolia avenue is now a vacant building that probably will soon be bulldozed uh that's heartbreaking it's just heartbreaking for any of us who worked in that newsroom it's it's hard to take um but you know the world moves on um there's daily newspapers may not be salvageable one can hope that honest journalism will survive um I sure hope so um you know I i continue to subscribe to the democrat I continue to subscribe online to a bunch of other publications um you know I still read four or five newspapers a day or news sources a day I try to look at at cnn and fox news at least once a day to figure out what they're saying um I don't during the years when when I was a journalist i would tell almost anybody who questioned me um about anything i'd written I said you know I might be right I might be wrong this is how I saw it you should read a lot of different sources of information and make up your own mind don't believe me do your own reading do your own research ask the tough questions demand that your elected officials be responsive to you a journalist doesn't have any more rights to information than anybody else journalists are just citizens the difference is they have an outlet that commands very large numbers of people and any human being has the potential to be biased and to make mistakes I made all kinds of mistakes um but I tried my best to get it right every time and you also have to remember in the days when I was in journalism generally speaking if you made three fact errors a year you were likely gone they like you fired you and by a factor I mean some printing something that was demonstrably false even misspelling people's names if you misspelled the names of three sources in a year if you got the numbers in the state budget wrong or the city commission budget wrong three times in a year you were probably out of the field forever so you know there were consequences for getting things wrong today I don't know I read a lot of journalism that seems to me to be pretty heavily influenced by opinion and I really think we have moved we're almost all there but at this point I think we've moved to a European model if you go to Germany and read the German press if you read German you can read two different accounts from the Christian democrats and from the social democrats and those it sounds like they're talking about two entirely different events and it's been that way and the same thing in France same thing in in Great Britain um uh the press has signed up on one side or the other when I was in journalism that was not so much true um and you know I got to say when I was a working journalist for the most part democrats were in charge of uh the Florida legislature and state government I took a great deal of glee and them being furious with me from time to time you know I had several governors call me up and say you know incredible things but you know what um my my answer to them was always okay show me where the fact error was and if if there was a factor I correct it so you know they might not have always liked what I wrote about them but I tried my best to be as accurate as I could I got to say my wife's reputation in the capital was always I she was several up uh rungs up the ladder for me um Linda was the capital bureau chief for the sun sentinel when she retired she had both democrats and republicans say to her you know we didn't always like what you write what you wrote but we always believed that you were telling the truth that's about the highest praise that you can get in this field and it's such a deviation from what we occasionally heard more recently where uh without mentioning any names sometimes uh journalists were called enemies of the people here and uh well a more modern era a guy who work who who writes for the AP for the associated press uh one of the great institutions of America incidentally um uh mentioned on twitter that he is sleeping with a loaded handgun next to his next to his bed now because he has received death threats and I got a few death threats um I had some guns pointed at me at one point or another um you know i when you're in one of those situations you're it's amazing the damn foolishness that comes out of your mouth but anyway um um it was a um it's it's not a safe profession in some ways um but it is important no and your contribution has been important too yours Linda's Lucy Morgans folks like Steve Bosque who in been total uh candor uh contributes to our operation from time to time and a whole host of others who continued laboring in those trenches day by day we're talking to Dave Bruns here on Perspectives from WFSU Public Media and if you miss uh all or a part of the program you can always find us online not only on the main website WFSU.org but also our WFSU Public Media Facebook page we try to have the most recent show up just as quick as we can thereafter the Thursday airing on the radio so you can go back and check it out whenever you want I know we'll probably circle back to journalism at some point here um to tell you the truth Dave but I wanted to ask how you made that again that transition from journalism into first the department of elder affairs here in town and then DOR and then AARP how did that go um well actually that came about as a result of a couple of editorials a series of editorials that I wrote about um uh an issue that I thought never got sufficient attention which was um aging services um so I wrote one of those editorials um and one of the people I called for comment one of the people I called for information was the then secretary of the department of elder affairs um in governor child's administration a guy by the name of Bentley, Lipscomb and Bentley was an a quote machine on the level of Max Topanovich he was he was a visionary he was eloquent he was funny uh he was irreverent he was very often unprintable and it was fun fun fun to talk to them so um I spent quite a bit of time talking to Bentley and I wrote a series of of articles about how Florida was facing this uh very uh challenging situation with aging of our population Florida was up until 2020 the oldest state the greatest state in America we were edged out just slightly by Maine um in the 2020 uh uh estimates by the census bureau but we still have uh about half again as many people 65 and older as uh the rest of the country and it's been that way for a long time half a century um so I wrote this series of of editorials and Bentley was over the moon about about those editorials so um uh I was in the the uh uh editorial board offices one day I got a call Bentley said I need you to meet me for breakfast there's something popping so I went to Jim and Milt with um uh with Bentley for uh for breakfast and Bentley offered me the communications director's job while I was sitting there I have to say I was physically dizzy walking out into the parking lot it was a wrenching moment for me to leave journalism but Bentley was a great guy that was a great opportunity it was a great mission it was an organization to be proud of um and I took the job and I loved it it was it was uh telling stories just as I did in journalism except about from one particular um on one particular issue but to a huge audience the audience was no longer just the readers of you know the big bend in in north Florida the audience was statewide nationwide global um and it was a compelling story it was a it was a story about this massive demographic change that was unprecedented in human history there are only a handful of places on earth that are as gray as Florida but it's among the greatest places that have ever existed in human history and the the the challenges that came with that the contributions that older people made and the challenges that came with that were epic and still are and that was a fascinating story to tell and it was uh gripping and it was a great cause to work for so you know that that challenge that some PR people have to uh go through where you know they've been in journalism and their their charge was to tell the truth and now they have to go to work for an outfit that really doesn't want the truth told that wasn't anything that I had to worry about um I never worked for anybody in state government and never worked for anybody at AARP that wanted me to cover anything up it's just the opposite they were very interested in getting the truth out there so I was ex I have been under a lucky star throughout my entire career I wish I could claim that merit had something to do with it but it was mostly blind luck um it was it was um uh especially at AARP it was a great great outfit to work for one thing that you always were notable for though Dave in any of your communication roles whether with the elder affairs folks or dor or AARP was you seem to be a bit more proactive in maintaining good relationships with journalists and perhaps some of your compadres in those jobs because still uh we very often have these discussions in our news meetings in the morning about how do you pry the information out of a number of communications directors again not mentioning any names but it seems to be much more difficult today than it was and we see this with different administrations on the state government level some governors lot in child's being I will drop his name there notable for saying to his um agency reportees go ahead you guys handle your own communication shops you really don't have to run anything through the governor's office unless it's something really mind-blowing to what we sometimes have more recently which is everything goes through the governor's office and if you can even get a a scrap of information out of them boy you're uh you're in high cotton for the rest of the week it's you know I never understood the logic behind that um I never understood you know the combative nature of of the way um some uh practitioners of public information uh did their jobs I you you can't possibly win um all you can do is lose and the people that you're working with are doing this not because they want to get rich not because they want to um not because they want to sharpen an ideological axe for the most part although there are some of them um not because there are sharks who um are aiming to hang your scalp on the wall for the most part although there are some of them for the most part they're just trying to tell the truth I always dealt with journalists from a position of respect I respected their mission I respected their professionalism I respected their integrity and for the most part that paid off and when you know organizations that I work for got criticized I always told my bosses well you know are they right did we do something wrong could we have done that better my my practice was always when we were responding to criticism I was was trying to tell my bosses okay how do we how do we take responsibility and move on how can we demonstrate that we're about getting to the fix getting to the solution delivering the result for the taxpayer delivering the result for AARP members and not about defending ourselves people citizens of the united states have a right in fact in my opinion a duty to criticize people in government and in powerful institutions if you're in power you signed up for that gig you have a responsibility to take criticism the key to success is getting to the fix acknowledging whatever responsibility you is is reasonable and fair and then getting to a solution if you can if you can demonstrate not just to members of the media but much more importantly to the public that you're not all about defending yourself you're about getting to solutions that serve people you're going to be rewarded you're going to be rewarded at every turn I don't understand why that council is not um shared every day in public information um circles in Tallahassee and especially in Washington molten textbook and marketing courses the ultimate example of what you just talked about was the Tylenol situation in the 1980s where the Johnson Johnson was forthcoming came out and said this is the problem it's our bad here's what we're going to do to fix it and it vanished from the news cycle within a very short period of time it was not a self-perpetuating gotcha kind of thing and it seems as though a lot of folks either never learned that lesson or have forgotten it no I wish that were true the truth is we people who are whose whose modus operandi is to is to deny and counter attack are very often rewarded today they're rewarded today um by their true believers and increasingly Americans are being have been not our being they have been pulled into two divergent camps and they have two divergent realities for each for participants in each one of those realities it it feels real it feels logical it feels valid and the other guys feel like the enemy I cannot even begin to say how dangerous that is that's of all the challenges that the united states faces climate change the pandemic the economy on and on and on and on and on that's the worst that's the worst challenge we we face that though you know those of my good friends who are liberals are not willing to hold liberals politicians accountable for the things they do wrong and those are my good friends who are conservatives are not willing to hold conservative politicians accountable for the things that they do wrong that each side is so embedded in their reality that they've lost sight of the of their fellow countrymen that you know there are so many things in the situation we find ourselves in now where we go back and read Lincoln let not our the bonds of affection be broken by the passions at the moment we must be friends we must not be enemies there there's a lot there there's a lot there to unpack yeah but despite those wise words it was the election of Abraham Lincoln that to a large degree precipitated the American uh if you were to take the deaths that occurred in the American civil war from 1861 to 1865 and it actually went on longer than that um in reality um and you were to apply that to today's population you'd be talking about close to four million dead the south did not recover from the loss of the civil war for a century in some ways we're still we're still fighting many of those same conflicts in racial equity it is disappointing it is disappointing to see what has happened in in is just didn't happen in the last few years that's been that way forever when I was growing up in that little town in Missouri that was a segregated town there were white and black water fountains white and black uh hotels white and black restrooms one of my best friends was a boy by the name of Eddie Mayfield and Eddie was um uh my constant companion when he and I were eight or nine or ten years old about the time we were 11 or 12 our parents started pulling us apart his parents first and we were friends in high school I helped him get through algebra he was a football player he helped me get through high school um i often think about uh Eddie about how I would drink out of the uh water fountain that's in a public park across from the drugstore and Eddie drank out of the um the water spigot mounted on the back wall of the of the drugstore that had colored only uh stenciled on the wall over it Eddie's dead Eddie got involved in uh a very unfortunate incident um an armed robbery he went to prison in uh Missouri state penitentiary in Jefferson city and he was uh he got a shank between the ribs and got killed uh and he's buried in the poppers field behind Missouri state penitentiary and here I am talking to you it almost sounds like a a Samuel Clemens thing it's it's [ __ ] gym radio I don't know that things don't change it seems what we have a long way to go in this country on a lot of fronts and and I'm there are days when I'm very concerned very worried on the other hand you know we've been through some real real difficult times before and yet we have risen it's up to us to determine if we will rise again that's not up to our leaders that's not up to the media especially not the media it's up to us there is no them there's only us on a happier note though what lies ahead for Dave Bruns now that you have some additional time on your hands uh well at the moment I'm retiling the floor in the uh in the kitchen um I have about two years worth of deferred maintenance that I need to catch up on here at our farm uh our our horse ranch on the east side of Tallahassee near capitola I hope to volunteer for AARP um I am a board member of choose Tallahassee and I am a I guess you could say a volunteer for triple r horse rescue um when your wife tells you you have to do something is that volunteering I i think it is I think it is that's uh at any rate um she's the president of triple r horse rescue and so um um very often I am vowing told to um work with a horse or go trailer horse or get a horse out of trouble or do something else with uh with one of those horses so um that I'm looking forward to that I'm very much looking forward to spending time with our grandson who is a year and a half old and um he in full disclosure Tom he does have his own horse lucky kid I wanted one so bad when I was growing up and I just couldn't convince the parents that you know they should trade in that tricycle for an appaloosa or something it uh just didn't get traction as they say you guys though in in the horse rescue biz certainly had your hands full when it came to the aftermath of hurricane Michael as I recall there were a lot of horses in need of rescue out of the panhandle and that organization jumped right in to affect those rescue I'll tell you there were um a bunch of folks who were involved in that I want to call out specifically Roxanne Speer from rainbow's edge rescue who was heavily involved in that and you know we at triple r horse rescue supported Roxanne and some of the other organizations that were in there trying to help um you know it's there is a public shelter for abandoned abused and neglected dogs and cats but there is no publicly supported option for large animals and so if a horse is neglected or abandoned or abused and law enforcement or animal control has to step in very often the solution solution air quotes is uh euthanasia that's not much of a rescue um so that's why triple r exists and over I believe about 11 or 12 years they are I think they're up to 310 horses that they've rescued rehabilitated and re-homed um that's and this is a hundred percent volunteer there's no paid staff they do all their own fundraising they receive don't receive money from state or local government it's it's all volunteer run and one that's great when it comes to finding those points of commonality where people can put aside maybe more contentious stuff and work together on on a common project that everyone can get behind it would seem that animal rescue whether horses dogs cats I don't know pigs whatever would be at least part of a potential solution for that you're absolutely right and we find people of you know widely divergent uh political opinions who are supporters of triple r who are engaged as volunteers um uh and that is a model I think if we're going to solve our problems it's it's necessary for put to put aside what divides us and to agree on a goal and go for that goal um and we can do that we've done that throughout our entire history the talk Phil talked about it uh so you know it is it is still the case that voluntary associations in the united states play a role that you don't see to nearly as great a degree in Europe for example in most of the developed world um in most places in in the orient you just don't see those voluntary associations uh rising up to tackle issues and getting things done but that's one of our great strengths and Alex de Tocqueville even mentioned that back in the day that was something that did make America great to his way of thinking that was unique and different from anywhere else in the world words of wisdom from Dave Bruns it's been a delight to have you on sir I wish you a happy retirement all the the best to miss Linda and the four-footed critters out there on the ranch east of town and uh I hope to see you once we come more out of this lockdown situation Dave we can get together over a cup of coffee or something a little bit stronger and and swap some more stories again okay absolutely and Tom thank you for your service as a journalist we'll appreciate that and I I've got good inspiration and people to look up to like yourself sir thanks again Dave we really appreciate you being on today sure thing Perspectives produced by WFSU Public Media in Tallahassee thanks going out to Taylor Cox, Paul Dam, Amy Diaz de Villegas, Brandon Brown, Trisha Moynihan and Lydell Rawls our Director of Content Kim Kelling also acts in the role of executive producer and I'm Tom Flanigan next week we're going to begin an extended visit to the iconic north Florida coastal town of Apalachicola beautiful place also the magnificent river that bears the same name and we're going to look at a new effort to restore the historic configuration of the communities downtown and we'll be getting the latest on the continuing battle now before the highest court in the land over the river's water we'll talk about it right here on Perspectives from WFSU Public Media sir thank you