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What Do I Want To Make Happen?Broadening the Dialogue - building a positive vision for the future of this city, and the civic institutions to make that possible. (10/6/2002)List of Community Organizations working to influence public policy on Santa Cruz specific issues - these are the groups I want to work with and support by expanding their participation, and facilitating the creation of more groups like them. Answers to Various (Endorsement) Questionnaires
Additional Position Statements
The Green Commitment No on the Downtown Ordinances!You cannot legislate polite behavior. You cannot violate the Constitution by creating a set of laws that are deliberately and consciously intended to be selectively enforced against specific classes of people (young folk, homeless individuals and anyone who looks like something other than a middle-class shopper). Time, place and manner restrictions must be reasonable and limited to the minimum necessary to prevent significant harm from occuring. They cannot be used to effectively legislate Constitutionally protected activities out of existence.You can apply successful models of solutions based on mutual respect and community consensus. The mediation program put in place by downtown street musicians has successfully prevented significant problems and the need for restrictive legislation for two decades. None of the mis-named "Downtown Ordinances" (which, in reality, apply to the entire city) address any of the real and acknowledged problems with sexual and verbal harassment, violence, drug dealing or other criminal activities that have generated such high levels of concern among members of the public. Instead they criminalize the poor and powerless, and unduly restrict the rights of the public at large to occupy public space in pursuit of rest, political advocacy, or artistic expression. No on the privatization of public space!Down town is a public gathering place, not a private shopping mall. Current city policies seem designed to drive everyone out of downtown except shoppers popping in and out of their cars. Bench after bench has been removed. Fences and rails have been erected to close off public space, and to render planters and other natural sitting spots unusable by tired shoppers on foot, the elderly and disabled folk. The ancient art of people watching, usually accompanied by a sandwich or drink, has now been effectively outlawed. Downtown is a destination, a community gathering space, a vehicle for public speech, artistic expression and commercial endeavor. A true balance of policy, a true progressive agenda for downtown, would honor all of these interests, not just one. I believe in a downtown for all, not just a select few.No on massive buildings downtown!Downtown is the heart of our community. It is what defines our identity as a city to both residents and visitors, and serves as the engine of our local economy. I will work to further downsize the downtown recovery development guidelines, and work to see that existing guidelines are enforced.Our downtown's small town, pedestrian friendly character is being threatened by an orgy of oversized construction that threatens to turn it into a Manhattan style urban canyon. The new "Cooper House" and the University Centre are two prime examples of this phenomenon, but the most egregious one hasn't even been built yet: it is the 90,000+ square foot, basement plus four story, SIXTY FOOT HIGH Rittenhouse building, which will fill the "hole" currently occupying the space across the street adjacent to the Cinema Nine. The City's Zoning Board unanimously recommended against approving this building, due to the fact that it failed to provide adequate vehicle or bicycle parking, and massively exceeded the mandate of the downtown recovery plan that buildings should not exceed three stories or fifty feet. A portion of this building will actually reach 75' in height, topped by a flagpole that will reach 104'! The current Council voted 7-0 to endorse this project, right after killing plans to explore creation of a pedestrian plaza on the site, despite 3,000+ signatures and other expressions of support in favor of a Downtown Plaza (see Yes on a permanent, multi-block Downtown Plaza! for my views on the subject). Bruce Bratton, downtown resident and columnist for the Santa Cruz Metro, spoke with two members of the Zoning Board, and their comments on the building were: "cheap-looking, ugly, horrific, looks like a fort, looks like the County Building, looks military, shouldn't be there, back to the drawing board, nothing that benefits the public, disappointing, mediocre, we wanted a jewel, too tall, severe design problems, tower is too prominent and the extra height of the flagpole is ridiculous." Beyond that, they said the building materials [Rittenhouse] wants to use are cheap, and the general plan calls for solid materials like brick and tiles, no Styrofoam or fake brick. After witnessing this vote, Bratton had this to say: If the City Council is going to ignore its boards and commissions in approving Louie's building, who do they think they're representing? SCAN endorsed a plaza at that corner, so did the Cabrillo Music Festival, Tandy Beal, members of First Night, Shakespeare Santa Cruz and 3,000 signers of a petition. Those groups were all ignored by the City Council in that shocking 7-0 vote. They ignored environmentalists who wanted green space downtown; they ignored business experts like Ken Burns, who said a plaza there would help business. The council never explored the funding sources to buy property specifically for urban parks and plazas. For more than two years the council never consulted parks and plaza experts. One thing is clear: no one can ever call this council unfriendly to business. When they vote 7-0 for "continuous retail," as Louis calls it, instead of even minimal open space for community use, they no longer represent me, and vice versa, for that matter. (bolding and italics mine) I agree with him 100%. It is a travesty of justice that monster buildings like this are approved without hesitation by the City Council, when even the smallest housing development must fight tooth and nail for approval. The City Council's priorities are out of tune with the desires of the community. It is time for a change.
Sources: Yes on Safe Sleeping Zones!Everyone deserves a safe and legal space to sleep. This is a fundamental human right. The city's current sleeping ban is a cruel and inhumane law that prevents a homeless mother and child from covering up with a blanket between the hours of 11 p.m. and 8 a.m. It makes sleep a crime, and makes being homeless a criminal act.Five of the seven current City Council members expressed opposition to the City's Sleeping Ban laws prior to election. Fitzmaurice, Krohn and Sugar all made statements pledging to modify the Sleeping Ban laws during the 1998 SCAN endorsement process. Ed Porter put his commitment in writing to the Green Party in 2000. Emily Reilly spoke in favor of safe sleeping zones before the City Council as a citizen, before she was elected. Current Council members claim they want to change the laws, but don't have the votes. The math just doesn't add up. There are many possibilities which could be explored, ranging from a supervised car camp in the parking lot of the County Building, to a program by which temporary, low impact camps are established in limited areas of the Greenbelt in which conservation work is traded for camping rights (as voted on, in a completely unfeasible form, by the City Council), to pilot programs by which one or two person modular mini-buildings are distributed throughout the city's neighborhoods and occupied by homeless individuals trained as caretakers for urban gardens and micro-parks (the Homeless Garden Project is an excellent example, and graduates from it could possibly serve in this role). The creation of a space where homeless residents can safely and legally sleep, either in a vehicle, or under a tent, is not the end goal, but merely the first step in a comprehensive plan to create a "ladder" of housing with which homeless residents can use to climb back into the mainstream. Right now, homeless residents face a cliff of $3,000 for first, last and deposit, plus credit checks and references, that makes it practically impossible to bootstrap themselves off the street. If they're lucky, they can spend two or three times what they would otherwise have to, for a room in a residential hotel. We need a way for people to gradually improve their quality of housing: from the streets, to a camp, to a dormitory or other very low cost (under $300/mo.) but safe and secure environment, to a affordable SRO or room in shared housing (under $600/mo.), to an affordable apartment or safe and legal "granny shack" (under $1000/mo.), to a market rate apartment or house rental ($1500 to 2500/mo.) to a mortgage and security ($2500/mo. and on up). Little exists between that $0 and $1,500 - $2,500/mo. levels, especially at the very low end of that scale (under $1,000/mo.), which is where the City's focus on housing should be. It is time for a change! Yes on a permanent, multi-block Downtown Plaza!The establishment of a permanent downtown pedestrian plaza would transform the civic life of the city. By creating a dynamic space for public dialogue, performance, and outdoor gatherings of all sorts, downtown could become the heart of the city in substance as well as in name. A downtown plaza would create a balance between public and private use, and serve as a vehicle for events and happenings that would draw residents and tourists alike, benefiting both business and citizens.Notwithstanding the recent and very timid endorsement by some Council members of the idea of turning a very small portion of Pacific Avenue into a temporary pedestrian plaza during part of the summer, the fact remains that any group desiring to petition the public downtown or otherwise engage in First Amendment protected rights of speech or artistic expression, must do so on a small (and rapidly decreasing) strip of public sidewalk. The absence of a true downtown plaza is a severe impediment to democracy and public discourse, and the City Council's lack of vision in approving the Rittenhouse building on the one remaining spot where a street closure is not required demonstrates the essentially commercial character of their philosophy of governance. The Sentinel claims that the idea of a downtown plaza is "ludicrous", and that it would provide "transients" a place to "congregate". Yet, Santa Monica's downtown pedestrian mall (The Promenade) is so successful, the owners of the enclosed shopping mall next door (The Santa Monica Place) are petitioning to have it torn down and turned into an extension of the existing three block pedestrian mall. In Pasadena, the Plaza Pasadena was replaced with the outdoor Paseo Colorado, and has been a strong success. The success of the Promenade is due in large part to the "funkiness" of it's character, its mix of low, medium and high end retail and vibrant street atmosphere. All things the Sentinel claims would make a pedestrian mall downtown a failure. Santa Monica has also successfully integrated housing, office and retail in the same buildings (something Rittenhouse claims is almost impossible to manage, which is why he did not include any housing in his monstrosity). In fact, over 338 very-low-income units, 36 low-income units and 150 moderate-income units have been built in downtown Santa Monica over the last four years. In fact, so much housing has been built, that the City Council there has decided to change its zoning regulations to slow down construction! Several very modest proposals have already been floated, only to be shot down almost without consideration and sent to bureaucratic neverneverland (a common tactic of our City Council, which has repeatedly referred items to Staff and the City Manager, and then not followed up when they failed to reappear - as happened with many of the HITF's recommendations), if even the slightest opposition emerges. Santa Monica demonstrates that a pedestrian mall is a viable option with benefits for business owners, landlords, shoppers and residents alike. With guidance and vision on the part of a new City Council, our downtown can become a model and a mecca for other cities worldwide. It is time for a change!
Sources: Yes on affordable housing!We can create substantial amounts of affordable housing without being dependent on outside funding or taxpayer largess. Current affordable housing policy is concentrated on creating a few large scale, highly subsidized projects - the type of housing that results is appropriate and necessary for a certain portion of the population, but can address only a small portion of the vast need and with state and federal funding for subsidized housing drying up due to budget constraints and policy changes, it is plain to everyone that it will never been enough to make a serious dent in the problem. In fact, one single recent project consumed almost a full decade's worth of affordable housing funding.The article above ("Council Lowers Downtown Threshold"), along with the articles documented below, demonstrate that the there is another way: the primary factor influencing housing construction (or lack thereof), is the complexity and design of the zoning process. In other words, how the market for housing is set up. Santa Monica has managed to spur a housing boom in one area of the city, by redefining the rules under which housing can be constructed (unfortunately, they left a pretty big loophole). Santa Cruz has managed to almost completely shut off housing development county-wide by erecting zoning policies and procedures that favor exactly one kind of housing: large, single family homes that cost over $500,000. Please don't get me wrong: Santa Monica is a much denser city than Santa Cruz, and much more urban with denser infrastructure, I'm not suggesting that we follow their lead and completely relax our environmental and other constraints and allow massive housing developments on a regular basis. But, what I am suggesting is that, with the lack of construction of legal Accessory Dwelling Units as a prime example, we need to evaluate where in the process we are setting up rules and regulations that artificially constrain the development of affordable housing. The City's General Plan allows for the construction of an average of 25 legal Accessory Dwelling Units a year, citywide. Current restrictions have resulted in less than 8 legal units a year being constructed - of course, we all know that far more units than that have been constructed illegally, without permits or proper city inspections. One City Council member has publicly said, more than half-seriously, that if we enforced zoning and code regulations, half the City's housing stock would disappear overnight. This is a safety and environmental hazard, forces thousands of people to live in substandard housing, and turns hundreds more into de-facto criminals simply for providing housing that people can afford. It also costs the city substantial tax and permit revenue, and distorts planning and infrastructure development, which is then based on information which has little bearing on reality. This is part of a pattern of head in the sand governance by legal fiction. If we pretend that this housing isn't being built, but don't enforce any regulations prohibiting it, we don't have to deal with the political consequences of allowing it, or of preventing it from being built. If we pretend that there are not dozens of people camping in the Greenbelt every night, we don't have to deal with the environmental impact, or with the political consequences of displacing those people onto city streets. If we pass a Living Wage Ordinance, but require almost no vendors to comply with it (less than thirty vendors from among the hundreds the City deals with every year), we can have our political cake, and eat it too - the business community doesn't get upset, little extra money gets spent, and Santa Cruz City Council members get to brag about having one of the highest Living Wage rates in the country, even if its impact almost entirely symbolic (outside of raising the wages of the lowest paid City workers). It is time that the Council is honest with itself, and the public, about what is going on in our City. It is time to end the politics of symbolism, and replace them with the politics of substance. It is time for a change.
Sources: Yes on supporting the Living Wage!The enactment and enforcement of a strong Living Wage Ordinance is the single most important thing we as a city can do to improve the standard of living of our low wage workers. It vital to preserving the economic and social diversity of Santa Cruz. And yet, the ordinance passed by the current Council is almost entirely symbolic, currently affecting barely thirty of the nearly nine hundred vendors the City dealt with last year (a number which does not include Social Service Program Providers - aka "non-profits"), of which more than six hundred could qualify for consideration based strictly on the current $10,000 minimum total contract amount. City staff reported to the Living Wage Advisory Committee (for which I currently serve as Chair) that of those twenty to thirty vendors, exactly one indicated that he had been required to raise his rates to the City in order to be able to come into compliance.Why does the Living Wage Ordinance cover so few vendors? Because it is confined to “Contracts for services”, and in practical terms, only a limited sub-set of those that are specifically listed in the text of the ordinance (city staff reports receiving strongly negative political pressure when they tried to implement a broader interpretation based on the law's statement that it includes, "but [is] not limited to" the services specifically listed). As an example of the City Council's "we can have our cake and eat it too" politics, earlier this year, the Council voted 7-0 to approve the LWAC's recommendation to raise the Living Wage by 4.6%, based on the SF Bay Area CPI for the preceding 12 months. They then proceeded to follow this up by not only failing to provide a cost of living increase to Social Service Providers (who, while not required to comply with the Living Wage Ordinance, have made tremendous efforts to come into compliance voluntarily), but actually cutting their funding by 5%. How non-profits are supposed to pay for a wage increase, when the city is shrinking their budgets, is a mystery to me. This is a slap in the face for all the hard work they've put in finding outside sources of funding to raise wages. Furthermore, when our committee recommended that the Council mandate that these organizations not balance their budgets on the backs of workers who currently earn less than the Living Wage ($11.00 an hour if benefits are paid) and would be hurt the most by a cut in their pay, the Social Service Program Committee (a sub-committee of the City Council) and then the Council as a whole both voted against this recommendation. If elected, I will serve as a strong voice for a meaningful Living Wage that directly affects as many workers as possible. When push comes to shove, I will place a priority on ensuring that the poorest and least powerful among us, receive the highest consideration and the utmost priority when it comes to budget time. Cut the "military budget" and prioritize funding for social services!Our "progressive" City Council recently accepted, without substantial comment, a report by City Staff that placed an absolute priority on preservation of the City's Fire and Police Department budgets in the case of a utility tax repeal. This is after the city has voluntarily implemented a new retirement plan for police department members that will cost the city a least a million this year (and more every year in the future). The budget alternatives were couched in such a way as to suggest that even partial parity (cutting police and fire by 14.2%, and everything else by 28.4%) would be disastrous. Given this apparent preference for zero or minimal budget cuts in those two departments, other City Departments would face average budget cuts of 44.6% (on top of current cuts already enacted due to budget shortfalls resulting from local and state tax revenue decreases). In practical terms, this means that areas where cuts are actually possible would face year over year decreases on the order of 70-80%, which translates to program after program after program--social services, parks and recreation, city commissions, you name it--being totally eliminated. Even if scenario two (mild cuts to Fire and Police) is utilized, discretionary programs would still face budget cuts amounting to 50% or more, and many would be terminated completely. Veteran defenders of Pentagon military budgets would be hard pressed to do better.During the budget hearings, Police Chief Belcher declared that 60% of arrests made by the Police Department are alcohol related - that the County jail is the biggest detox facility in the County, and hundreds of untreated alcoholics and addicts are released close to downtown Santa Cruz every year. I say, "cut the military budget", and divert some of the millions saved to drug and alcohol rehabilitation to get these people off the endless and costly (to them and the public) treadmill of addiction. Fund prevention, not detention! During the budget hearings, the "progressive" City Council, without a single word of official protest, unanimously approved a renewal of City Attorney John Barisone's contract for services (he is not a City employee, and in fact, double-dips by acting as City Attorney for the City of Capitola as well) despite the fact that he raised his rates. They did this after wasting two hours of the public's time debating how they could cut a total of $28,000 out of their own budget (much of which normally is not spent in the first place). They then proceeded to inform the Citizens Police Review Board (which has finally started to get some teeth under the leadership of Mark Halfmoon) that they needed to restructure themselves to reduce their cost of operation in half. Given that the City has spent over $200,000 in legal fees paying Barisone to defend its mobile home rent control ordinance and nearly $300,000 to defend against a lawsuit by the Blue Lagoon (just two cases among many), and $13,000 (to date) defending itself against Robert Norse's lawsuit over violations of his civil rights (outspending litigants by a ratio of 10:1 in both of these latter cases), I suggest that careful consideration of "in-sourcing" this function would be worthwhile. Why didn't we hear a single suggestion to this effect from any of our current City Council members? It is time for a change! |
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