Answers to Locally Owned Business Alliance Questionaire 

 Personal Information 

 Questions 

• The budgetary crisis - prioritize those areas of spending which have the greatest return on investment for the community, preserve core social service programs, and work to expand the city's economic base.
• The affordable housing emergency - we need to fix the bottom rungs of the housing ladder, to restructure the market to facilitate the construction of market rate affordable rental housing along urban transit corridors and in core areas around downtown, and to provide decent, affordable housing near where people work.
• The need to expand and diversify the city's civic and economic infrastructure - we need to construct a strategic plan, a vision for the entire city of Santa Cruz that encompasses all neighborhoods and commercial districts. We need to pro-actively move to connect our waterfront to our downtown, and offer day tripping visitors a compelling reason to stay once they've left the Boardwalk or wharf area.

What are your top three priorities if elected and how do you plan to accomplish these goals?

1. Mentor new community leaders and foster increased civic involvement - by reaching out to youth, Latinos, and other communities of interest, and by facilitating the establishment of neighborhood organizations and business improvement districts.
2. Fix the bottom rungs of the housing ladder - encourage construction of market rate affordable housing via regulatory reform, establish a legal campground and car/RV park, create better paying jobs close to affordable housing.
3. Restore downtown as a center of community and culture - establish a pedestrian plaza downtown, and develop programs that result in all sectors of the downtown community being invested in a vision for the area that addresses the real problems it faces.

What do you see is the top two challenges facing locally owned businesses in the community of Santa Cruz and why?

• Acquiring and retaining quality employees given the housing challenges they face.
• Surviving the economic downturn and shifting economic trends in the greater Bay Area.

What past experiences would make you a good member of the Santa Cruz City Council in regards to issues facing locally owned businesses?

I co-founded Web Communications, a locally owned self-service web hosting business (two partners in an LLC), in May of 1994; we grew it from two guys in a 120 square foot windowless office at 903 Pacific Ave., to a twenty-five employee, $3 million dollar a year business without external funding (at which we sold it, due to competitive pressures from companies with greater resources). During that process, I touched every part of operating a business: answered phones; balanced the company checkbook; put together computers and wrote computer code; dealt with the DMV when we lost title to the company vehicle; dealt with the Small Business Administration when we tried to obtain a loan; hired/fired employees, dealt with their problems, and helped create a successful corporate culture; dealt with equipment vendors, outsourced staff leasing companies, technical support; negotiated with landlords, supervised and managed architects and contractors when we constructed our new offices... you name it, I dealt with it.

I then co-founded a venture financed corporate start up in Silicon Valley, and watched it struggle with internal management problems, business model issues, and ultimately fail completely. The difference in the dynamics between the two companies taught me a tremendous amount: a locally owned business is a totally different creature, psychologically and operationally, from a professionally funded corporation. Locally owned businesses are a part of the community, and invested in it in a way that no other type of business is.

How will you address the interests and needs of local business owners, employees, customers and visitors if elected to the Santa Cruz City Council?

I will work to expand the city's social and economic base and expand the city's attention beyond the immediate downtown area to the other commercial districts in the city, as well as work to build the civic infrastructure necessary to produce a common vision for the city as a whole; one that focuses on locally owned businesses, neighborhood based social and business amenities, and addresses the jobs/housing imbalance that dramatically negatively impacts everyone's quality of life through increased traffic, increased commutes and labor costs, and decreased quality of life in terms of housing.

As a member of the Santa Cruz City Council, what steps would you take to improve the channels of communication between locally owned businesses, the City Council and other services?

See the "Broadening the Dialogue" document on my web site for details. In summary, work to establish Neighborhood Business Improvement districts (and neighborhood organizations) to provide local merchants with a formal voice in the city's process of governance, bring the government to the people (including the business community) by broadening the base of participation in public meetings and physically locating individual meetings in different areas of the city on a regular basis.

 We are interested in your opinion on: 

I oppose them. They excessively restrict civil liberties such as freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, and do nothing to address core complaints: drug dealing, violence, sexual harassment and conflicting uses. They violate a very successful twenty year compact between musicians and the city based on peer pressure and mediation, sacrifice poor people's rights on the altar of political convenience, and have nothing to do with the progressive agenda the current council majority was elected to implement. The solution is to have an ongoing dialogue about our downtown that empowers and engages all sectors of the community and focuses on non-authoritarian, non-legalistic solutions such as mediation, support for public space downtown (such as a pedestrian plaza) to minimize conflicts between uses, and alternative recreational venues for youth.

Revisiting and/or revising the Beach Area Plan

We need a plan that fits the values of this City, that is appropriate to the neighborhood, and that won't unduly impact the rest of the City. But we need a plan, we cannot continue to neglect the economic and social potential of the Beach Flats area, both in terms of what it can deliver for that community, and for the city as a whole. Our waterfront should be an economic engine that is equal to or greater than that of our downtown, and the two should be linked, physically and economically. The Boardwalk should be surrounded by a thriving pedestrian based commercial district and be reachable on foot from quality overnight accomodations. The waterfront area should be pedestrian friendly and linked with the downtown and overnight accomodations via logical foot paths, bicycle lanes, and pedestrian friendly public transit (trolleys and other systems suitable for just hopping on and off of).

The City's Utility Tax

We need to vote no on Measure P. After we've preserved the existing tax (and thus the services dependent on the revenues it generates), we need to reconfigure the Utility Tax to be less regressive (to prevent this issue from returning), and work to broaden the tax and economic base so that the city is less dependent on any one source of revenue. Passage of Measure P would disproportionately impact youth, elderly folk, mentally ill, homeless women and children - the most vulnerable among us. As well, resulting cutbacks in basic infrastructure maintenance and other programs will compound the cost by causing the city to forgo matching funds from the state and federal government, as documented in the City Manager's report to the City Council on this subject.

The concept of a Soquel Ave. Bypass

I have no idea what this refers to, can find no reference to this term in any document available on the Internet. Am researching the question.