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Pete Buttigieg: “South Bend was a billion dollar mandate from the EPA to…”

Featuring: Pete Buttigieg, Democratic | Former Secretary of Transportation, Former Mayor of South Bend | National

Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation"

Published January 28, 2026 | Video Starts at 43:58

And then we built on. It was the collaboration around the very sexy topic of wastewater, which to try to make a very complicated story short, South Bend was a billion dollar mandate from the EPA to change the way that the sewer system emptied into the river. It was basically impossible to comply unless they figured out a different way to better use the sewer system that we had. (43:58–44:05)

CLAIM

Asserts that South Bend faced a billion-dollar EPA mandate regarding its sewer system.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Pete Buttigieg

“The data centers are $10 billion projects.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 17:18-17:22
“At the time that the Security Council was set up, something like 90% of people in China were rural peasants.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 30:03-30:13
“Today, people living in China, for the most part, enjoy superior technology in transportation and certain other sectors to people living in…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 30:13-30:23
“The interconnection between the life of the university and the city has become extraordinary.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 06:31-06:41
“The world [children are] coming into will obviously be so radically transformed.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 08:57-09:02
“We seem to have less access to the truth now than we did 20 years ago.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 10:27-10:33
“The most important questions about how AI will unfold...are fundamentally policy questions.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 10:38-10:46
“We have decisions to make, whether it's public policy about the economy and who gets to benefit from the enormous wealth that is being…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 10:48-10:59
“Educational institutions will of course have to develop policies that will support the building of tools that we need to do on our own.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 11:23-11:34
“There's no more reason to expect automatically that [AI] will make us worse at thinking than it is to assume that the advent of the…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 11:34-11:46
“We've had the benefit of about a 100 year period in which any question of fact could mostly be settled...if somebody...could produce a…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 12:24-12:37
“That's no longer available to us, or it's in the process of, we're in the process of losing it.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 12:48-12:54
“Few places are more vulnerable to it [AI], but I think also a few places have more value that they might be able to unlock from it than…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 13:35-13:46
“The GM facility alone, that's three or $4 billion.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 17:14-17:18
“I met with electrical worker apprentices in classes with more than 200 people at a time.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 17:25-17:30
“It used to be maybe a dozen union electrical workers in an apprentice class, if you were lucky.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 17:29-17:35
“We invested in this community both in ways that were very much associated with the administration, like EVs and newer clean tech industry.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 17:38-17:48
“That was ARPA dollars.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 18:12-18:14
“When I took office, our per capita income, I think, was 17,000 or $18,000 per person.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 19:27-19:33
“Unemployment was double digits.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 19:34-19:37
“Newsweek said we were one of America's 10 dying cities.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 19:36-19:40
“Universities are under attack not because they are liberal, but because they are independent.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 22:33-22:41
“The moment that we become the kind of country where your ability to get a job or your eligibility to get cancer research funding or your…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 22:57-23:26
“The example set by the Republican members of the State assembly is so powerful and important because they were pushed to do something that…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 24:53-25:08
“What every firm, every university and every politician has discovered if they tried to play the game of this administration in order to…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 26:13-26:32
“The rules-based international order has always been one in which the rules were bent.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 29:09-29:16
“We have some institutions that are designed to be robust enough that they last for centuries, like the US Constitution.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 29:35-29:43
“Most of the biggest changes, transformations, upheavals in human history were driven by young people.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 34:05-34:13
“If you want to testify in Congress, you have to be invited or subpoenaed.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 35:15-35:21
“If you want to speak in front of the elected officials making decisions in the South Bend Common Council, you show up on a Monday night.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 35:25-35:32
“When I see a five year old child used as bait in Texas in an immigration race, trade to get a hold of his parents who, from what I…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 37:43-37:59
“An American citizen is being dragged out on a cold Minnesota day in his underwear by troops.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 38:00-38:09
“Political Instagram or TikTok or whatever it's going to be, which by the way, has overtaken actual media journalism, is how a lot of people…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 41:11-41:21
“By doing [this], it could save hundreds of millions of dollars, which meant thousands of dollars per family in their water rates in a low…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 44:21-44:31
“We faced this here during the first Trump administration before it ever came to the level that we're dealing with right now.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 46:29-46:35
“Companies that were showing me their leadership two years ago in electric vehicles... building battery factories in Glendale, Kentucky and…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 52:49-53:04
“Now two years later, they're backtracking, some of them writing off billions of dollars of value that was effectively just wiped out by the…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 53:19-53:31
“Our administration... believed not only that there was an environmental benefit to electric vehicles, but that there was a strategic benefit…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 53:29-53:29
“China make these huge investments in EVs... because they understand the strategic value of conquering the future of the auto industry.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 53:49-54:06
“If you're an automaker, you intend to do your product planning on about a four year cycle.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 54:29-54:34
“We're supposed to be a country that has less vulnerability to policy whiplash than other systems.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 54:44-54:53
“The filibuster... should be done away with.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 55:15-55:23
“Government in general at the federal level has become so unresponsive to people, to what people actually think, that you get these lurches.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 55:41-55:54
“The way we elect members of Congress is not set in the Constitution.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 57:27-57:30
“The electoral college is a problem.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 57:40-57:43
“I think a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics is appropriate.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 58:53-58:57
“Most Americans want [a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics].”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 58:57-58:59