00:00I thought I'd bring up a subject of interest. I do a lot of this as president and try and
00:06save
00:07money. And one was the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which everybody knows. That's where
00:13Martin Luther King made his great speech and where others have likewise made great speeches
00:18and great events held there. It's very famous. It was built in 1922 and it's more than 2,000
00:25feet long. It's 167 feet wide. It's very big. That's like taller than any skyscraper, 2,000
00:33feet. And here's a picture of it. You probably recognize it. Right now it's got no water in
00:37it because it was in terrible shape. It was filthy dirty and it leaked like a sieve for
00:44many years. So I actually went over, went with Secret Service and a group of people and I
00:49took a look at it. One of the people with me was Doug Bergamot, great secretary of the
00:55interior. This comes under his purview. And he said, yes, we've had a lot of problems
01:00with it. It's not working. It hasn't worked for many years and it's always filthy dirty.
01:06And I said, well, we're going to solve the problem. And they had bids to fix it. They were
01:12going to take the stone out, which was granite, very expensive, very thick, and replace it with
01:18stone. And it was going to cost $300 million. And it was going to take maybe more than three years.
01:26And I said, no, there's a better way of doing it. I said, what we're going to do is I'm
01:29going to call
01:31all three of these people that have worked for me in the past doing swimming pools. That's all they
01:37can do is a swimming pool. And I said, give me a good price. We can do it for maybe
01:43a million and a
01:44half to two million dollars, as opposed to $300 million. We scrubbed the surface of the existing
01:52granite that's been there since 1922. We then grouted all of the granite, fixed it up, took about
02:00two weeks. And now we have a nice clean surface on which we're putting a industrial grade swimming pool
02:11topping. And they said, what color would you like, sir? It's called American flag blue. I said,
02:17that's the color I want. I want American flag blue. It'll last for 40 or 50 years. There'll be no
02:24leaks. There'll be no anything. It'll look gorgeous, beautiful. So it's a story in business. And here's
02:31the difference. Because somebody said, well, sir, but one, wouldn't it be a better job? I said, no,
02:37no. This is a much better job for much less money. It will look far more beautiful, more beautiful
02:42than it did in 1922 when they built it, much more beautiful. So we build it in much less time
02:48for much
02:48less money. But I don't mean much less. I mean numbers that nobody can even believe. So it's
02:53a million and a half dollars versus 300. It's two weeks versus more than three years.
03:02That's just the way it is. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Comments