
A Lively Experiment 10/25/2024
Season 37 Episode 18 | 28m 59sVideo has Closed Captions
This week on Lively, a change order spikes the cost of the Washington Bridge demolition.
This week on a Lively Experiment, a change order more than doubles the cost of the Washington Bridge replacement. Plus, a look at local political races. And is using AI in school cheating? Moderator Jim Hummel is joined by Republican Strategist Lisa Pelosi, Providence Journal State House reporter Patrick Anderson, and Boston Globe Reporter and Rhode Island Weekly contributor Steph Machado.
A Lively Experiment is a local public television program presented by Rhode Island PBS
A Lively Experiment is generously underwritten by Taco Comfort Solutions.

A Lively Experiment 10/25/2024
Season 37 Episode 18 | 28m 59sVideo has Closed Captions
This week on a Lively Experiment, a change order more than doubles the cost of the Washington Bridge replacement. Plus, a look at local political races. And is using AI in school cheating? Moderator Jim Hummel is joined by Republican Strategist Lisa Pelosi, Providence Journal State House reporter Patrick Anderson, and Boston Globe Reporter and Rhode Island Weekly contributor Steph Machado.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- This week on "A Lively Experiment," the cost of demolishing and replacing the Washington Bridge just got a lot more expensive, or did it?
And what local races and ballot questions do you have your eye on next month?
Our panel weighs in on theirs.
- [Announcer] "A Lively Experiment" is generously underwritten by.
- Hi, I'm John Hazen White Jr. For over 30 years, "A Lively Experiment" has provided insight and analysis of the political issues that face Rhode Islanders.
I'm a proud supporter of this great program and Rhode Island PBS.
- Joining us on that panel, Providence Journal, state House reporter Patrick Anderson, Boston Globe Reporter in Rhode Island, PBS weekly contributor Steph Machado and Republican strategist, Lisa Pelosi.
Welcome into Lively, I'm Jim Hummel.
You need a scorecard these days to keep up with the cost and timeline for the replacement of the Washington Bridge.
The Rhode Island DOT issued a change order for demolition that more than doubles the original cost.
But the director insisted in several interviews this week that the work was going to have to be done sooner or later.
It reminds me of the old commercial, you can pay me now or you can pay me later.
Patrick, it seems like we're paying them now and we might be paying them later.
- Yeah, and we're gonna keep on doing it.
It's just a drip, drip, drip of added costs.
I mean, we knew this was in the mail because they've been making changes.
They've been encountering all kinds of difficulties along the way.
In the demolition, in the procurement, all of those delays add to the cost.
Every time you change everything, you add a little bit more to the cost.
There are even a few more that are baked in, including paying for the pause that they just had for about a month that haven't been accounted for.
So this number is just gonna keep creeping up and up and up.
- What I don't understand is I heard Peter Alviti in a couple of interviews this week on the radio and on television say, well, we didn't include taking out the footing.
So this is getting a little bit into the weeds, but into the muck probably of the Second River.
We were eventually gonna have to do this, but now we're doing it now why?
Why wasn't that written in initially?
Did you get?
- I mean, they botched the first procurement about as bad as you can do it.
So what went well with that?
I mean, the first time they went out bid, they essentially just tried to dump all of the risk on the contractor and say, do it faster than is humanly possible and take all of the risk if everything goes wrong and reuse this old part of the bridge so we don't have to tear it out.
At the same time.
It was never feasible.
And they basically, the industry has basically told them, no, we're not going for this.
You did it wrong, do over.
- And I think you reported something earlier, about the environmental impact just before we even knew that the were needed to come out.
So I don't know if that's been factored in the fact the cost of doing that and the timeline of delay that that can happen too.
- Yeah, well the more you go into the river, the worse it is for environmental permitting.
There are river herring that swim, this is probably more than people wanna know that swim back and forth up into the streams and East providence and into sea conk.
And so the more you mess with the river, the more DEM and the feds will look at that.
They say that they have a deal for the environmental permitting worked out.
We'll see, but that's all they want to minimize how much they muck around in the river because of that.
- Well, and I'll push back on the notion that they were going to have to pay to remove the pilings anyway, because the original plan, again that was totally botched and that no one bid on, was to leave the pilings and piers in the water, let the contractor decide whether to use them or whether to take them out.
And so it wasn't a definitive.
- [Jim] On their dime.
- I don't know if there would've had to be a change order, like how exactly that was gonna get paid for.
But it certainly wasn't in the original cost estimate to take the pilings and piers outta the water.
Now they've added that to the demolition contract and now the demolition is going to take much longer than expected, not finished until the end of 2025.
- We thought we were gonna talk about 38 studios for a long time.
The Washington Bridge may eclipse all of that.
- It's the gift that just keeps on giving, especially if you're writing on it.
And I think this is like job security for you going forward, you know, how this is gonna be turning out and then to have the congressional delegation doing their job, getting the money, but based on what they thought the cost would be.
And it seems like we're gonna have to go back to the federal government for even much, much more money to get this covered right now.
- Yeah, well the big thing is the election commit, the presidential election because so far with the Biden administration, the federal government has been very accommodating to all of the trials and tribulations and payment issues that Rhode Island has had.
But a Trump administration with a new director of transportation federally might not be so happy about this, might not be awarding every grant that Rhode Island asks for and go along with the matching and not look to critically at the oversight of the bridge that led it to be broken in the first place.
- Yeah, it was really important to get that money secured before the election in case a different administration.
Well, no matter what, a different administration is coming in, but in case a Republican administration comes in that might be less friendly to a blue state, but it is, they're literally promising money on a project that we do not know how much it's going to cost.
We don't even have a design for the bridge.
So there's so many things up in the air in terms of how much this thing is gonna cost.
And it doesn't sound like we're going to have really clear answers on that anytime soon.
- You both were at that news conference, it seems like a long time ago.
Steph said off air was just last week.
It seems like a lot longer to me.
That went on for almost an hour and a half and then they had the community meeting that went on for almost two and a half hours.
It seems to me that they're getting the message they need to be a little bit more accessible.
- I'm seeing a, I would say a little bit of a correction.
I think that there was a lot of defensiveness coming from the McKee administration, a 100% backing of every move that they had made, every move that director Alviti had made.
And then we saw the governor give a really critical statement of Director Alviti when they had that community meeting.
That was actually like a nine minute.
- [Jim] Nine minutes on Yom Kippur, no questions.
- Presentation on Yom Kippur.
You know, when obviously a lot of Eastsiders who were affected by the bridge celebrate that holiday by the way, or observed that holiday.
And he was very critical of the DOT director.
And I don't think I've seen him be critical of the DOT director at all this whole crisis.
And so they had a very lengthy news comfort.
They took every question, they had a really long community meeting where they took a ton of questions.
So I think they're trying to show that they are taking the frustrations of the community seriously.
- A good step, - I think so, it's just been almost painful to watch how much they haven't been paying attention to the communication aspect of this.
It just seems every step of the way that there's something that's been going on, it's such a delay to learn exactly what's going on.
For example, those sensors that they put into the bridge to measure the impact of all the cars going over, they didn't announce that ahead of time that they were doing it.
So it was like a stumble to let the public know, but we wanna know everything about this bridge going forward.
So it's just been one bad misstep after another since this started.
And when you talk about Peter Alviti, I know I was on the show in January and I said his days are numbers.
So I guess I'm not good when it comes to predicting people's case.
- [Jim] Your math is awful a little bit.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Well I mean the thing that just seems strange to me is that the only thing now that he has been criticized for by the governor is this Zoom call and the communications, but nothing about the underlying problem that caused this and all of the problems that have happened in the year basically since the bridge was closed that has not brought any public admonishment.
Just this Zoom meeting.
- And Link Chaffee said some people's hair on fire.
He said he talked to your former colleague in Channel 12, Eli Sherman and said, why is this guy still employed?
Which I think a lot of us probably thought, but Link Chaffee said, and he recounted actually Link went back and remembered some of the crises over the years where there were fall guys, Gina Raimondo had to get rid of people 'cause of U Hip.
- And you see, you often see cabinet secretaries step down over crises even if they didn't really do anything super wrong personally.
But the buck stops at the top, right.
You often see these resignations when there's a big crisis.
And so far Director Alviti has held on.
- Alright, we are just a couple of weeks out from the election locally, it's been a bit of a snoozer as the general officers are not up, there's a lot of ballot questions locally that you'll be going to.
We have five on the state ballot and a couple of interesting general assembly races, mayors races.
Lisa, what do you have your eye on in this election cycle?
- So to the mayoral races I'm paying attention to in Cranston, I wanna see what happens with the incumbent Ken Hopkins after that kind of tough primary that he had with Barbara and Fenton Fong also looking at Warwick, how that race is going to come.
And then I brought in, will there be a Republican in East Greenwich voted.
So they put out this flyer, it's okay to vote for balance consider Republicans.
So I'll be seeing after November 5th if we have at least one Republican.
- It was, and but not that long ago it was a mostly Republican powerful, wasn't it?
- It was.
- And then it shifted.
- Totally, yeah.
- Yeah, what are you looking at, Patrick?
- Well, I mean to that, I mean, I think even broader, just how many Republicans are gonna be in office across the state, going in all levels from town councils and school committees to the General Assembly.
I mean, there's not much of a chance above that.
But will Republicans could make some gains in the General assembly, could maybe a seat or two and they still have to defend some of their open seats.
So it might, it probably won't change a lot, but it's always interesting just to see kind of how small that delegation could get.
And will there be a strong or even a moderate sized presence from Republicans in the state to keep that kind of Democrat Republican dynamic alive?
- Yeah, it is a quiet year locally, even though it's such a big year nationally, I don't think anyone is, will be surprised by the presidential results in Rhode Island.
I am watching this first ever in the modern era, at least school board election in Providence.
Providence voters have not gotten to elect the members of their school board for many, many decades.
I'm trying to nail down the exact year, so come back to me.
But this is likely going to be the group that takes control of the schools back in a few years.
The people who are elected.
- Well, but it's a four year term.
- It's a four year term.
- So for three years, they could be twiddling their thumbs, right?
- Yeah and they better be planning because if 2027 comes around and they get control of the schools back and they say they need another year to plan, then what were they elected to do?
So they have a really long time after they get elected to plan to hit the ground running when they get the schools back in 2027 or maybe a little sooner, commissioner Infante Green has said, maybe it'll be sooner.
And she says she's not gonna go longer than 2027.
So it's an important election and I think it's been really quiet.
Not a lot of money in the race, even though it's three times the size of a city council.
- Are they expanding the seats or is it the same number of seats?
- It's gonna be 10 seats, so expanded by one.
- Okay.
- Five seats will be elected and five seats will be appointed by Mayor Smiley in December.
And so we will know before January who the 10 people are gonna be.
And it's important, but there hasn't been a lot of, like, haven't seen a lot of mailers.
There's been a lot of door knocking and on the ground campaigning.
So we'll see what happens.
- Where are you on the constitutional convention?
- I'm in favor of it.
I believe the voters should have the right to bring that, if they issues on their mind that the General Assembly are not addressing that they should be able to do it.
So I like to see it be approved this year.
I was looking at how it's written in the Voters handbook and it's very interesting to me that the question for or reject is to, men are revised, but when you read the description of it, they go into the potential of it be totally rewritten.
And I don't think anyone ever was going into this thinking that we were going to totally rewrite the constitutional convention.
So to me I thought thought that was a little bit alarming for them to include.
- [Jim] That was when the Secretary of State sent out.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Well and the other thing that I found a little disingenuous, and Patrick, you've seen this, the Speaker of the house, Joseph Cart, came out with a statement we're taping on Friday, on Thursday saying, "And this could cost millions and millions of dollars and we're always worried about money."
This is a guy who added a quarter of a billion dollars to what the governor proposed last year.
Now three $4 million, sure.
That could go to worthy programs, but to all of a sudden cry poverty.
I know he's against it philosophically, but then to pull the the financial card, I found a little bit tough to swallow.
- Yeah, I don't think that's the primary objection to this.
- No, no, I think he's, but I mean, but to throw that in there, like, we're watching out for your money, please.
- Yes, I mean, I think the main reason is that the current situation works very well for him obviously and the other members of the general assembly and the Democrats in charge.
I mean, and to the point of the money, it's almost, I can see them being a little worried and I think I've made this point before just about the actual mechanics of it and how messy it could be.
I mean, you've seen how difficult it is for the state sometimes to organize like things to go right and have projects come off.
You do have to like actually form this little shadow legislature and give them a staff and like find a place for them to work and they've gotta do all this stuff and like who knows what kind of hijacks could go on.
And the last time they did this, they did run out of money.
Like after a couple of months they couldn't pay the staff.
There was this whole, I mean it could get really weird.
So I understand how they just would not want that whole mess of deciding whether people get paid, whether the delegates get paid.
Like all, there's just a lot of stuff that could go wrong with this, which is why no state has done it since we did it in '86.
- The only thing I wonder is, so bond issues always pass in Rhode Island.
The only one I remember is, I think it was for the Heritage Hall of Museum years ago.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Back where the old Mary Gantt Electric is, I'm dating myself, I wonder as people go in, there's no master lever anymore.
But you know, the constitutional convention, if they're not paying attention, check, check, check, check, check, check on all the bonds, whether could pass the back door.
- I wasn't, there was a bond that failed last year in North Kingstown for a new, it's like a new police station and something to do with pickleball.
- But they married it all together.
- Yeah, new school.
- Yeah, people were just like, I think some people are sick of being every year for hundreds of millions of dollars for this, that and the other thing.
And then sometimes the building doesn't come to fruition in the way that they promised because of cost overruns and inflation and rising interest rates.
- Like Warwick.
- [Jim] They're trying to build two high schools.
- Warwick, Warwick voters approved, I can't remember the number of the top of my head.
- 360.
- Thank you.
- A lot of money to build two high schools and now they're saying that they need another 38 million or they can't build in order to do the project as promised.
And that's a lot of money.
So I don't know if people go down the list and say yes, yes, yes, yes.
Obviously because it's a presidential election year turnout is going to be higher than a midterm and there will be people going to vote for president who maybe don't know about the local ballot issues as much as the voters who go to vote in these smaller election years.
So we'll have to see.
- I think just to Steph's point, a big thing, and it goes back to this north Kingstown bond, is that there was actual organized opposition to that.
And the big thing I think I see with all of these questions is that there is right now, so our not organized opposition to the bonds and there's no organized opposition barring a late surprise.
We've still got a like a week to go in favor of the constitutional convention.
And I think that is what makes people think it's very, very unlikely to pass.
'Cause you have all, most people don't know what it is and are confused by it.
And, but the only thing that they are hearing in the last couple of weeks is this could be the end of the world.
This is terrible.
- From Democrats, they're hearing it from Democrats.
- Right, and there's no, but there's nothing on the other side making any kind of argument.
Public case on the airwaves or in mailers or anything like that of why they would want it.
- Well, no, in two weeks Steph had an interesting article in the Boston Globe published today on Friday front page, congratulations.
Is using AI cheating in school?
It's an interesting concept.
We were talking a little bit before we came on air, you used to have those programs that college professors, what was it?
Turnitin.com and now where does AI fit in it?
It's a tough question.
- It's a tough question.
And I think what we learned in exploring the story was that state education departments have been very slow to issue any sort of guidance to school districts about should you allow AI to be used in what capacity should you allow it?
When does, where's the line between using it as a useful tool for research versus basically cheating on an assignment.
And the jumping off point for the story was this a court case out of Hingham where a student got a bad grade on paper because he used AI on his outline for the paper.
And the teacher determined that that's plagiarism and gave him, I think he got detention and a bad grade and he's now suing saying this - Was his dad a lawyer?
- Who knows?
- He's saying, this wasn't in the handbook, this is gonna affect my college prospects.
My GPA went down, I have to now explain this as I apply to colleges.
And so, it really spurred like it was a talker, the story and it spurred a lot of conversation about it.
And we talked to a number of teachers who said, yeah, it had not been contemplated until my students started using AI.
And I realized that I needed to set rules for my own classroom.
Here's when you can use ai.
Here's when you can't use ai, you have to cite exactly how you used it.
And a lot of schools just haven't thought about it yet.
They've banned ChatGPT on their computer networks.
But students are using this in their regular lives you can use, you can talk to an AI chat bot in the Snapchat app.
You know, there's a lot of ways that teens have very easy access to this technology.
So schools have to figure out how it fits in.
- Lisa, you gotta figure out how to incorporate the technology because it's out there, it's going to be used.
And I think, not to simplify it, but it should just be referenced.
So I think what happened was some of the students were using the AI totally not referencing it and saying this is my work.
- [Jim] Cut and paste.
- Yeah, and this is my work.
So I know years ago when I was in grad school, Wikipedia was just starting to come out so you had to cite Wikipedia, the professors wanted to make sure you did that.
So it's just making sure that you're citing something that's not your own work.
But I think the AI can really be helpful and the professors and the teachers, because I'm talking from a university level too.
'Cause it's being dealt on a university level and you just gotta figure out how to incorporate it into your curriculum.
- I would not want to have to deal with, figure out what I don't know what the solution is like.
- Hello, you have a child in elementary school with the train's coming at you sir.
- I know and it's, yeah and I'm just staring right at the headlight, I mean but on, I don't know what the answer is about ai.
But even before that I am surprised that there hasn't been more of a debate in Rhode Island about phones in schools.
I thought some candidate somewhere would make that an issue of like we should ban these.
And like some places they are, some places they aren't.
I know in Connecticut, Ned Lamont came out with a big, we should get phones out of schools and I've asked the governor about it and education is his number one topic and he doesn't this Governor McKee and he didn't really have any thoughts about it.
I'm just surprised no one has like picked that up as a baton of like we should get him out.
- Yeah, I did a story about that for Rhode Island PBS weekly focus on Central Falls.
Central Falls where they put the phones in the pouches and you know, there was a little bit of opposition, I believe it came from linking where they said, well in the real world your phone's not in a pouch so you have to learn how to live with the technology.
But honestly most of the people I talked to were really in favor of kids.
- The Los Angeles school district decided since your story, the entire district said not because of your story, maybe, they said this is it, it's too much of a distraction.
- Yeah and I hear from teachers all the time who are like, I'm so glad the phones are gone because it's so much like for the teachers to have to constantly say, get off your phone, get off your phone, get off your phone.
Listen to me is such a time suck in their day.
And so, but at the same time technology is growing and it should be used in education, so there's a balance.
- Yeah and they'll have to ban the watches too at some point.
- Yeah, they do, in central fault you have to put your, if you smart watch it all goes in also goes in the pouch and your air pod's very important because otherwise you listen through the pouch to your music.
- It's a very sneaky, isn't it?
- The daughter doing that when she goes to bed?
She's listening like I listen the Red Sox game under my pillow with trans radio step ahead of me.
- Alright, let's do outrageous and or kudos.
And I got one other thing I want to get to Patrick, let's begin with you this week.
- Well I don't know whether this is an outrage or a kudo, it could kind of be both.
But the independent man statue, which I think is on one of the images behind you, which is normally on top of the State House dome and has been down for repairs to be restored and then to fix the top of the dome that it stands on was supposed to be back on top of the state house in fall.
That was the last update we got.
That was in the spring.
So it's fall and I don't know where, when and where the independent man is going to be put back up.
I've asked and haven't gotten an answer yet.
So that could be bad and outraged that they don't get the independent man up back before they, when they said they would or maybe the independent man, which people like taking photos of and like standing in front of will be there for everyone at Christmas.
And this is a positive thing that people can make Christmas cards and go visit the independent man for longer and it's actually good.
So maybe it's a kudo, I don't.
- You are a man for all seasons.
You could go both ways on that.
- And this one.
- Maybe they wanna save him one more winter out in the cold.
Lisa, what do you have?
- So I don't know if I have a kudos or an outrage too.
- Oh here we are.
- So here we are.
So looking at how the candidates in these last couple of weeks are trying to engage voters into the campaign.
So on the Democrat side we have people like Taylor Swift and Oprah and now Beyonce today and Eminem.
- Springsteen, - It's Springsteen, Usher.
And then on the Republican side we have Elon Musk who came up with what appears to be this million dollar raffle scheme to get registered voters in the key battleground states to sign a petition and be eligible for this million dollars.
I mean this is borderline illegal and we won't know if it is or not until after the election.
And if it is, he'll have a fine of $10,000, which for him is probably coffee money.
- Yeah, yeah, it's crazy, except for you.
- Well we didn't get to the gas station story, but let me peel, I'll peel back the onion a little bit on the reporting process of city of Providence City Council wanted to do a ban on future gas stations in the city, not existing ones.
And it's an environmental thing.
So setting aside the debate about environmentally whether we should still have gas stations, all of that, I asked like the most basic reporter question ever, which was like, oh, like send me a list of the licensed operating gas stations in the city.
Like presuming of course if you're gonna ban any type of business you must have studied.
How many do we have, where are they, do we have enough?
Nothing.
To this day, this was like a couple weeks ago, I wrote the story, never got me the list, never got me the number of gas stations.
- Was that the council or the administration?
- Both, well the administration and fairness, the council came up with their proposal.
- [Jim] Right, so the administration doesn't really.
- It's their proposal, right.
But the policy people, the councilman who proposed the ban couldn't get me anything.
It was purely a we're gonna take this stance that we don't want more gas stations and we wanna use that land for housing.
It ended up ending in a compromise.
They are not fully banning gas stations.
But now if you wanna build a new gas station, you ought to have to have a special use permit and it's only if the land is unsuitable for housing.
So that's how it ended.
- It almost seems well it was also what was the deal?
They didn't want to have any more storage units because they said the land's being taken up that we could use for housing.
- Yeah.
- Did they ever do that or not?
- They did, yep, yeah, they did.
And actually one of your colleagues, I think Wheeler had done a story about how some people wanna roll that band back.
So I haven't covered that particular one.
- Where are people gonna put all their junk if they don't have sand units?
I guess I just assume that if you're gonna ban any type of business, regardless of, I understand they're doing it on environmental grounds, but I was like, oh you didn't- - You'd have a metric.
- You didn't do like a market demand study.
Like people still have cars and not everyone can afford an electric car.
So I was just surprised that no business or market analysis went into that.
- We have, where did people put their junk before?
Self storage.
- I think everyone needs to do the Marie Kondo and get rid of their junk and then we wouldn't need, that's any self-storage units.
- The hoarding shows, that's where it came from.
Patrick, we just have a couple of minutes left.
There's been a little palace intrigue at the Senate and it's kind of spilled out now with the Senate president, Dominic Ruggiero, basically has said his majority leaders on the out, he wants to replace him.
But Ryan Pearson seems to think that he has a shot of maybe hanging on.
How's that gonna work?
- I don't know about that.
I mean I think he might have to just make sure he has a parking spot when he gets, but yeah, I mean this aside from majority leader and Ryan Pearson, the big question is just who is going to run the Senate be in charge of the Senate next year and beyond?
And Dominic Ruggiero is, says he's fully in control and it's gonna be him and there's nothing to see here.
But the fact that no one has seen him really in public and there are still questions about whether he is up to that are gonna remain at least until the big caucus after Democratic caucus after the election where everyone will be watching to see does he walk into the room?
Does he show senators?
I'm here, I'm back.
You can feel confident of giving me your vote to lead the Senate and that you're not something weird.
And like voting for someone who's not gonna be there.
- Probably wouldn't be a good look if they wheeled him in in a wheelchair, right?
That probably wouldn't be a good optic.
- I mean that would be better than if he didn't, wasn't there at all and asked them to vote for an empty chair.
- Because he didn't show up for a lot of- - No he didn't.
- Session.
- He was calling in, and talking to folks when not physically showing up, to do that.
So, I think it just comes down to relationships.
And I don't know how much Senator Pearson has developed relationships over the past couple years that he's been the leader there.
Does he have that support that he can transfer to him or does Dominic Ruggiero still have that strong hand over the senators going forward?
- If the Senate president saying this is the person I want rather than you.
- Right, exactly.
And it seems like Pearson and Ruggiero's relationship has been irreparably damaged.
Pearson came on the Rhode Island report podcast this week and said things that he had not revealed before about that infamous meeting in March at Ruggiero's House.
And he seems to think he still has a shot.
You know, I watched during the primary how many senators, you know, were campaigning for Ruggiero including Progressive.
So he seems to still have a lot of support.
- Alright folks, that is all the time we have.
We do appreciate your spending part of you a weekend with us.
Lisa, good to see you and Patrick and Steph, we're heading into the home stretch to election day locally and particularly on the national level.
So stick with us.
We'll have a full analysis of everything that goes on over the next week and join us back here next week as "A Lively Experiment" continues.
Have a great weekend.
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