 Welcome, welcome to Inside the Scoop. We are thrilled to have you all here and our candidates. We are awaiting one more, but we're, they have to start without her. So I'm hoping she's on her way. Welcome, we are, as I said, thrilled to have you thrilled to bring an event that's a little bit unconventional and hopefully enjoyable and also informative for your election 2012 here. My name's Margaret Oasis and I am here representing the Santa Cruz Geeks and I have up on the stage Jeff Omerin representing Santa Cruz Next and Robert Middleton, the Seven Ones. And we, three organizations came together along with Cruz Ayo to bring this event to you this election year. So without further ado, I'm gonna have, each of us are gonna say a little bit about our organizations and I'm gonna start with Jeff. Hey Margaret, thank you so much. Thank you all of you for attending this evening. This is the most important, in my opinion, when it comes to politics, the impact of local politics is the most important and for our future of the city and where we're going, being here tonight is just a great step in your commitment to Santa Cruz. So thank you again for being here. Santa Cruz Next, we have a vision that is truly to inform the community, inspire our members and really work for the good of the community and try to be a catalyst to connect our members with events like tonight, the Inside Scoop and other really valuable events throughout Santa Cruz that we feel will be towards the betterment of our community. I would like to take a moment to have all of the next board members that are here, just kind of be recognized, wave or I'll point to you and during the break tonight, please come and visit with us to learn a little bit more about what Santa Cruz Next is or maybe some of your visions for what you'd like to see in the community, share with us. So without further ado, over to Robert. Well, thank you and thanks for coming out here again and thank you to our candidates for coming. So a little bit about what Symonomics is, is that we are a local software company actually incubated at UCSC and our mission is to improve the civic engagement process. So in the community so far, we've done around 2,500 interviews just in the city of Santa Cruz about local issues from water to climate action to soon to be homelessness throughout the campaign. So we just wanna, we really wanna streamline the process by which people can get involved and have their voices heard. And so when we heard about this opportunity to get involved with these two wonderful organizations to really put a new spin on a kind of event like this where it's much more intimate in terms of being, after the question answer period to be able to have a mixing and mingling period to actually go up and talk to the candidates and ask them personal questions and things like that. So really happy to be a part of this. We're gonna be launching a workshop that's gonna follow up online at symonomics.com with the questions and the candidates afterwards. So please go ahead and check with that afterwards. So the schedule for tonight's event is going to be initially we're gonna have a first question answer session with our three moderators. And then we're gonna have a quick 30 minute mix and mingle session afterwards which is kind of an intermission. And then finally a second question answer section for 45 minutes. And then a final mix and mingle session as we begin to close things out. And I'll be doing timekeeping or the event. So make sure that all the candidates know. I'll have the iPad up in there. And yeah, we'll do. I'll definitely hold my hand up for you guys. And then you'd like to introduce the panel. Yes, yes, yes. I would like to introduce the panelists. We have on our panel, first we have on the far right, with Hodge, Hodge is actually, sorry. Local, awesome dude who does a lot of the entrepreneurial activities and he's an environmental activist. He's the founder of Adventure Out in CrossFit West. He's a Santa Cruz native and deeply interested in our community's future. In addition to his businesses, he also sits on several boards including Santa Cruz Next and Santa Rhyans Fund. Welcome. We have Peggy Dolgenos of Cruzeo. She's president and co-founder of Cruzeo Internet, which makes her literally the best connected person in town. 10 gigabits in downtown Santa Cruz. She's pretty awesome. She's an entrepreneur, programmer and graphic designer with a goal of making technology work for people of every stripe. And Chris Argenberg, he has worked in engineering for Adobe Systems in Western Digital. He's representing the Santa Cruz Geeks tonight. And he was a visiting researcher at the Institute for the Future. Pretty cool stuff there. He's providing consulting for startups and enterprise clients, as well as a city of Santa Cruz and the US government. On the side, he produces music, surfs and enjoys the mostly blissful returns of two decades in Santa Cruz. I just want to introduce our candidates. So my job is to be able to pronounce all your names so I apologize. We have Mike Posner, Rochelle Moran, Pamela Comstock, Ceci Pinero, Don Leigh, Steve Leitch. Steve Leitch. Steve Leitch. Steve Leitch. Cynthia Massins is missing. And I know that she is intending to be here. And Jake, sorry. Welcome. And I will let you guys get started. All right, so without further ado, we're gonna get going here with the first question. And just so you guys know, Robert here is our timer. Standard questions will always be a one minute response time, unless we say otherwise. And he will have a timer going. So I'm not gonna waste any more time. The first question is for Ceci. First one on pot seat. Here we go. All right, here you go. Ceci, do you have any specific ideas how to increase citizen participation in city government? Increase citizen participation. Banking. This could be the answer to many questions, but I believe that we need to leverage the things that we do well. And that we need to bring the unity back in the community. What do we do about arts and tourism, education and nature? And now I'm sounding like a politician like I've not even answered your question. So ask it again. Specific goals to increase participation in city government. Specific ideas is how to do that. Well, having a youth panel or a youth portion of the city council, when I was on the school board, we had always had youth representative. There you go. Very good. So this question was going to be for Cynthia. Do you have any specific ideas on how to increase citizen participation in city government? I've been focusing on increasing community participation. And one of the things I found is that when you give our community an opportunity to participate in the solution, they show up. And that's been evident in our drug done cleanups and our clean up of Evergreen Cemetery and the Shannon Collins Victims March. And every time we have one of these events, people come out and they talk to us and they say, we want to be heard, we feel invisible, we want somebody to reach out to us and we're being seen as a leader. And so I will use that leadership on city council to host town hall meetings. So instead of having that two minutes when a topic comes up that you feel really strongly about, you know, and you can maybe fit it into your schedule to rush down to city council, we can have these town hall meetings on a monthly basis when or whenever it's needed and we can come out and hopefully come up with solutions together. How would you attract more businesses to Santa Cruz? There's so many different ways, but let me highlight one. Peter Koch from our city economic development department is here. And one of the things that I'm gonna do is just keep him at work. He is amazing at doing that. But one of the things that he's doing in addition to kind of his hands on work out in the business community is he's led a project called Open Counter, part of our grant from Code for America that is going to make it so much easier for businesses large and small to get started, to simplify our permitting process and one stop on the internet, see everything that needs to be done, one point of contact. And this is often what we've heard is the biggest impediment to business getting started is it's complicated. So the city has heard that. We're about to roll this out and it's really gonna transform. Excellent, okay, so I have a question for Jake. Sorry, Jake. In your opinion, what are the major off highway as in city streets, traffic issues, and how would you address or solve them? So is the highway nine, highway one, not one I can talk about? Bay and Mission is really dangerous for bicyclists as I've heard from a lot of people on the bike and I live right in that neighborhood. So that's a big concern to me and it's tough to pinpoint one way that you could address that problem and fix it, but I think that it needs to be monitored more by police officers like it is sometimes at the start of the term at UCSE. You can't come down Bay Street in speed because you'll get a ticket if anybody drives down or you know where that one is and you just don't speed and there needs to be more of that. And that's pretty much the main one that I know of. I don't really like the roundabout either. I think that it wasn't very good before but the roundabouts made it worse so that's definitely of concern to me too. Thank you. Is this from Micah? So knowing that conservation has been a key component of our water management plan, how would you balance our water needs with the need for economic growth? Well, we've done some conservation and to me it's just shown that we can do more that we can be better both in a micro level. So I just called George Wilson and they're gonna next month install this thing under my sink that holds five gallons and when I flush my toilet, the water will go into my toilet. According to Sloan Plumbing, which is not a low energy company, that's gonna save like 6% of my residential water supply. So that's a micro level thing that we could do and that the city could do. The city could take water neutral development money and pay people to go around like PG&E does and install those things. At the macro level, we could do the similar issues with gray water. So our water treatment plan is right by the wharf which the city owns. The city could run pipes under the wharf which would be relatively easy and put gray water in all the toilets of the wharf and then we could offer the same thing to the boardwalk. And the boardwalk toilets flush in the summer. So if we gave them, so told the boardwalk, look, you can pay half the water rate to retrofit your toilets of gray water in the summer. That's the kind of thing we do. There's no simple answer. When you wanna live within boundaries as an environmentalist, you don't look for simple solutions. You look for 2% here, 3% here, 4% here and you make it work while having a moderate amount of growth. Great, thank you. I switched places, so this one's for Cynthia and how can we get, oh, this is a good one for me. How can we get companies that started in Santa Cruz to stay in Santa Cruz? Thank you. Thank you for saying. You're in a tech mind frame here and that's probably what you're thinking because we do think of the tech startups and then they get to a certain size and they wanna migrate to Silicon Valley. There are a lot of different companies in Santa Cruz. So for each sector, I think the important thing is to talk to the reach out and talk to the people in those sectors and find out what are their issues, what will keep them here, what are their obstacles to growth. We do have some great companies that have started here and stayed here. O'Neill, NHS, there are some fantastic ones. Many years ago when I was mayor, I did go out with our economic development director and talked to company owners, very small from six employees to very large ones and asked exactly these questions and it was pretty revealing. They talked about the things that kept them here in Santa Cruz, the things that were obstacles, the things that were driving them to relocate and many of them were making conscious choices. Am I? Stop. Oh, okay, sorry. I didn't know what the time limit was. Stop. It's crazy. It's crazy. Okay. Watch the screen. It's ready. Well, I saw that but I didn't know what. Okay, so next question. This one is for Rochelle and it is actually the exact same question. How can we get companies that started here in Santa Cruz to stay here? I think there's a variety of things we can do. There's no silver bullet involved in this. One thing that I noticed when I worked over the hill for an assembly member, the career technical education programs on that side of the hill coordinate amazingly well together from the university level down to what the Workforce Investment Board does. And they look ahead to see what the county workforce needs are and then they adjust the classes offered at high schools, community colleges, and even the UCs to fit what the future needs of that community would be, as well as the recent needs. One of my favorite examples is they decided they needed solar installers. So they started a solar installation program and there were a group of young men who, and I say men because it literally was that, some of them ex-cons are gonna step out with solar installer degrees and they'll be making $40,000 a year installing panels. So it's that type of innovation that I think we could have here to keep businesses around. Excellent. This is for Steve. This is kind of building on or challenging Jake's question. What are some of the major off highway challenges for traffic issues in our town and how would you solve them? Well, a couple of years ago when I ran for city council, one of the things that I wanted to do was make this a better bicycle town, a better bike town. We don't spend nearly as much money. We don't strategize nearly as creatively. We don't really plan for the future as much as we should in terms of having people be able to bike around to bike transit, to bike commute, to be able to be safely transport from one place to another, simply on their own two wheels. We need to do much, much, much more of that. We simply don't do that. There are other things I think that we need to consider. And one of the ways that we can reduce our non-bike traffic, non-pedestrian traffic, is by having people be able to work and live in Santa Cruz, be able to walk to where they live, whether they work, be able to walk to where they go to school. There are several programs that we have already about greenways to school, things like that. Those are the kinds of things you want to encourage. And the more we do that and more make ourselves a better bike town, the more that we'll be able to solve the challenges of our off highway traffic. So the next question I have is for Pamela. And Pamela, what type of growth do you see as positive and sustainable for Santa Cruz? Positive and sustainable, I think we need to bring in new businesses. I think we can take some of our existing buildings on Ocean Ave and upcycle them. I think there's plenty of opportunity for growth in our community. And based on the figures from the recent Gibbs report, we're seeing that a lot of people in our community are shopping elsewhere. So if we can provide places for them to shop and spend their money, if we can grow that way to start, I think that that would be sustainable. But one of the keys to actually growing our economy is to work with our existing businesses and make sure that they're thriving. And that'll be the best way to attract new businesses to our community. So we need to work with our current business owners and come up with an action plan to increase business. This question's for Dawn. So this is sort of looking at our food and farm community. We're going some really exceptional movement in this area for our community. And the question is what type of growth do you see as a positive, I'm sorry, my fault. So many questions. How will you promote our emerging food and farm economy in its culture and skin crystal? I think we're doing it. And one of the kind of what I would roll back to is not just zeroing in on that, but just how do we promote essentially our visitor economy? Because I think that's how it will really grow or that part of our economy will grow is because we become known as we are beginning to as a destination for organics and great food, locally grown food. So I think that it's kind of, it's working with some of the entities that like the Conference and Visitors Council to publicize this, working with some of the associations that are in that field, working with the Conference and Visitors Council to really highlight what already exists because there's so much out there for us. And I think one way, an example of something that could happen is creating something of a new festival that highlights that and then really publicizing that festival to bring people into the community. Thank you. Hi, my question's for Micah now, you're on the spot. So what cities do you see as models for Santa Cruz's development in the future? Well, we are a great city and that we have a lot of interactions with people. And to me, the definition of a successful city is the most interactions with people as possible. If you don't want to interact with people, you should live out the country. And that includes, of course, commercial interactions which are really critical for the health of our city. So my model is San Francisco. Let's see if we can be, you know, San Francisco, like a small version of San Francisco where you can walk out of your house and up to the top of the mountains like my family did last summer. But you can also have that kind of intelligence and interaction and commercial activity and just sort of buzz happening and cheap burritos too, I would like to see. All, you know, all in our urban environment. Portland's another example, which is similar. A little more spread out but served well by, you know, trains and public transportation. Cairo, I love Cairo. Has anyone ever wandered around Cairo? It's like the amount of depth of culture and interactions that you get in Cairo. That's what I want to see. I'm not interested in, you know, being Orange County or San Diego County. Santa Cruz is a city. So let's build it up as a great city. Okay. And I would actually like to ask Jake that same question. Looking forward, what cities do you see as models for Santa Cruz development? Yeah, I'm glad I get to answer this question. When I was trying to think of what I would say when you got it, it's really hard to say what you would want Santa Cruz to look like in the future. And the first thing I was wondering is how far in the future are we looking? I don't think that there's any, there's nowhere in the world like Santa Cruz. You mentioned Portland. That's a place that has a rich art music culture like Santa Cruz does. San Francisco's the same, but I can't see Santa Cruz being like anywhere else because Santa Cruz is kind of a community of free thinkers and we're not really like anyone else. So I don't think I'll, I'm not gonna pin one city. I don't want to be like any other city. I want to be like Santa Cruz and I want to grow independently and just be Santa Cruz in the future to be the best Santa Cruz that we can be. This is for CeCe. So government moves slowly and can often be resistant to change. What specific plans do you have to drive the adoption of digital technologies within city government? Well, one of my first projects is this educational tourism project that I would like to implement and that directly is in regard to technology and also directly and indirectly. The educational tourism project I came up with because I looked at who are the two largest employers in the city of Santa Cruz, the boardwalk and the university. So I thought let's put those two together and then what the university doesn't do is provide continued education units for professionals whether it's tradesmen or lawyers or doctors or nurses or anybody that needs to have continuing education units. So we could have those classes for continued education units at the Tannery Arts Center, at the museum, at cruise IO, at Nex Space, at the new Warriors Stadium, wherever it is that we have that we could hold these things. We could do that from how to build the Apple iPad app, you know, to make it a new sound for the time. Thank you. Okay, and now this question is for Cynthia again. So what type of growth do you see as positive and sustainable for Santa Cruz? Several ways of interpreting growth. Developments, people, let's take those two. We're a more or less build out city so we're going to operate within the city limits that we have. So, communities change and we have the opportunity to look at some areas that are maybe no longer thriving in the industry they were, no longer existing, we can reuse those. Tannery Arts Center is a great example. Once processed a whole lot of hides, dumped all the junk in the river, gone. So we've now reconceived that with the partnership of a non-profit and city and private money into the wonderful Tannery Arts Center. Other examples as well. Let's talk about people. We recently adopted a general plan for the city of Santa Cruz and it does accommodate a little growth. Let's just think of all these bright, brainy people graduating from the university who want to live here and make their careers here. We want to be able to absorb them and their great energy and ideas. Great, okay. Okay, so I have another question for Rochelle and it's a question you've already heard. What will you do to promote our emerging food and farm economy and culture? We're already on our way. We have a magazine and I cannot, I think it's called Monterey Bay Edibles, Edible Monterey Bay. So we're on our way. We're already starting to do things like that. I know one of the writers for that magazine and I don't know why the distribution for that is but it is a wonderful magazine. I think we need to expand our brand of Santa Cruz. Obviously, we have the Board Walkway of the Beach and that's great but we're a town where you can come here and spend more than just a day. We have this, I'm calling them sort of foodie pods that we have around Santa Cruz right now where you can go try wine out at the Swiss Street Courtyard. So there's a lot of potential in this area. For instance, I was reading I think AAA magazine and Sonoma County has something called the Milk Highway which along the Milk Highway are cheese tasting places that you can go from, spend the day going and tasting cheese. So I think we can do similar things here. Thank you. That's for Steve. Yes. How would you approach building a better relationship with UCSC? Well, I'd approach that by starting to build a better relationship with UCSC. I think everybody talks about the town gondolina about what kind of separation there is that people have to understand that we are only gonna thrive in the future with a mutually reciprocal, mutually beneficial relationship between UCSC and the city of Santa Cruz. The great university on the hill, we are a great city here but we have to forge true economic partnerships. We have to forge true technology partnerships. We have to forge true environmental partnerships unless we can do that and work together on all of those issues, neither one of us are really gonna thrive to the extent that we really can and our combined energies is really where we're at. One of the things that I am concentrating on in my campaign is to do everything I can to put the city of Santa Cruz in a position where they are talking to UCSC and developing that kind of partnership day after day after day until town gondolin is something that we've completely forgotten and it's just one solid united front. Great, thank you. The show of hands question. So if you thought those answers were short. Yeah, exactly. You should know the questions before you raise your hand. So... If you thought those questions were quick then here's some even quicker. Here's one anyway. Now think carefully. Do you consider internet access a right, an option or a luxury? Okay, so how many do we have for it's a right? How do we say an option? How do we say, how many say a luxury? All right. Okay, now we ask the audience. It's the audience challenge. So the question again is do you consider internet access a right, an option or a luxury? So who thinks it's a right? Okay, who thinks it's an option? I'm still alive. I think it's a luxury. And who thinks it's a luxury? All right, not so many. Interesting. Okay, and then the second part to this question. Should the city pay for public access, public wifi? Okay, how many think yes, the city should? How many think no, the city should not? Is it yes or no? It's yes or no. It's not a yes, it's no work items. No, yeah, like who didn't vote? You didn't vote? We kind of both did this. Oh yeah, okay, you want to be seen, you're not voting? You're voting yes, take, last chance, vote. The city should pay for public wifi, yeah. Not for everybody, it's no locations, what's it all about? And yes, it's not the kind of question. I've been trying to explore where internet is a luxury and it doesn't, it's really tough. Well, we can't explain, that's not an explaining question. I gotta give you an answer. Okay, so good. And now, we're going on to the third question for you to win. The politicians. All right. Oh yeah, sorry, we didn't ask that one. Oh yeah, see I got less questions because we have three and there are eight, so I get to do this whole part because I find this very thrilling. So, audience, you've had time to think about this question so I'm sure you're gonna answer it carefully. Should the city pay for internet, for public wifi? How many say yes? And then how many say, close. Okay, and on to more questions for the candidates with one minute answers. It was 50-50, so you don't have to pander to anyone on that one. I'm not sure they all voted, I want to make this matter. Okay, here we go. I have a question for Steve and my question for Steve is please describe in some detail your relationship to digital technologies. Wow, my relationship to digital technology. I don't really know how to explain that. I mean, I think I'm relatively tech smart. I think that I understand how to manipulate digital technology to my own uses. I don't know that I could really explain how to use digital technology or what the benefits of it would be to someone else. So from that standpoint, I can use it, I think, to enrich myself. I can use it in ways that I think will benefit people that I can reach out to, but I don't know that I can really explain it well enough to anybody else to convince them one way or another that what they're doing has anything to do with digital technology. This is to Rochelle, and a similar question that I asked before. What specific plans do you have to drive technology adoption within the city? Well, I'd like to see this coordination between the different municipalities within town to have broadband in the whole county. I think it's necessary to attract businesses. I look at cruise IO as a really good example of what happens when you get that type of technology. And I don't know if I'm correct, but I believe your building is 95% filled, if not 100% now. And so I think that would be my biggest priority in terms of improving technology in Santa Cruz. I would like to see free Wi-Fi spots, especially in downtown Santa Cruz and possibly in other areas as well. A quick follow-up. Do you think city government has a substantial enough understanding of these technologies to really get behind these initiatives? Well, I don't know all of the staff people who work for the city, but they do hire technical people. In fact, my husband works for the county, so I know that at that level, people were pretty savvy about what technology is available. So I think the city should look within their own staff and they might find they already have the expertise. Okay, thank you. Okay, and this one's for Jake. And it's one that we already asked, so hopefully you've thought about it a little. Please describe in some detail your relationship to digital technologies. Well, my relationship with digital technology is that I was a marketing and advertising major at San Jose State, where I learned a lot about illustrator, how to use a digital camera, how to edit video, how to make websites, and I am working on my own website, so there's a lot of things I have to do before that. So I'm really familiar with technology and I use it, and I don't know how better to answer that. I wanna use more of my time, do you think the city that people who are on city council should use digital technology more to reach out to their constituents? I think as soon as I am voted in the city council, we will be able to. Okay. I have a question for Cece, and it is actually the same question, I'm gonna make it sound a little different. In detail, I would like you to describe how you have a relationship with digital technology. Oh, I have a relationship with digital technology. Poorly worded. Well, I update my own website, and you guys can go there, cc with the number four, sccc.org, and I've learned a lot, I've been to tech raising, I've learned a lot from my friends who actually have spaces in next space, which is Altogether Now, and also Joanne Birch's organization that has a space up in next space. And I run a nonprofit and we use TechSoup, and TechSoup is an amazing organization that helps nonprofits become tech savvy and be able to buy the latest technology at a discounted rate. And I also want to give a shout out to Bootstrap. Who knows what Bootstrap is? Okay, okay, so I'll give a little shout out for Bootstrap and Bootstrap is the Twitter open source project that makes great looking websites easy. And that guy's coming. Cynthia. So, building on some of the things we've talked about, what can be done to expand broadband access in Santa Cruz? It could be to the home, it could be to businesses or on Wi-Fi hotspots. This is not a strong area for me, so I'm gonna put it back on those who operate in this field. You tell us what you need. And the city definitely wants to be a partner. This is an area where we can work with UCSC. There has been a partnership working with UCSC to bring, I think it's fiber over the hill to us. But this is certainly the foundation of a lot of our tech dependent businesses and we know that having good internet access is critical. You asked about what keeps people here with what drives them away. I know that that's one of the things that people say about having more access. So, in the role of city council, I think it's talking to the industry, to the interest that needs to be served and finding out what are the key issues. What can the city do as a partner? None of these things can be done by the city alone, but we can be a great partner in what we have been in the past. Thank you. Okay, and this question is for Mr. Don Lane. And you've heard it a bit. So, what specific plans do you have to drive technology adoption within city government? A lot. We have a relatively new chief technology officer who's just outstanding. I think we're just consistently upgrading. I mentioned our open counter effort, which is not just, you know, one thing that's really important about that to realize is it's gonna serve the community and the new businesses really well, but it's also gonna make internally in the city, we're gonna be much more efficient in how we process applications for permits. I think we're gonna continue. We've had some work with Civonomics to use that kind of technology to get, to work on getting greater public input. We used to do our city newsletter on paper, now it's all done digitally. So, I think we're clicking really well on that area at this point. We'll just keep going. Okay, I have a question for Micah. Micah, my question for you, which has partially been asked is what can be done to expand broadband access and Santa Cruz and do you believe city government should play a role in that? Yeah, we should bury a cable under the rail trail that we're gonna build throughout the city. We should run cables on our new gray water system that's gonna supply all the toilets in town. And we can, I think we can in a long term, partially incrementally get those costs back. I know I have velocity at my business and at my home and I'm paying less money. So it could be, Peggy might not like it, but it could be that the city charges five bucks a month a person to recoup the cost of burrowing the broadband and opening up those streets to do it. And we can still have a lot of customers because I'm saving like 10 bucks a month by my combined phone bill and internet usage. It also goes along with this question about providing free wireless access at certain points in the city. So a combination of increased broadband access and then also wireless points for users that aren't working out of their house all the time. We could be really like a city that's super connected. And I was saying before, a successful city is about interactions. That includes internet actions over the, that includes connections over the internet. Thank you. Chris, that doesn't mind sharing with us. Pamela. So I believe in our show of hands, you raised your hand before, luxury that internet access is a luxury. And yet for education, for business, for scientific pursuits, internet access is increasingly very necessary and very helpful. So given that, what do you think we can do to expand the access to your product? Well, I think I misunderstood your angle of the question initially because when you said luxury or it's a right, I think it's something you should pay for. So I think you should have access to it, but it's not something, it shouldn't be a city expense. So assuming it's paid for, how can we bring more bandwidth to our city and to our stakeholders? I work for a software company and our bandwidth and how quickly we get work done directly affects our productivity. It's a constant, constant conversation we have. So for the city to get better broadband and faster internet access, we have to build a public, it's super expensive, public-private partnership, work with UCSC. We have some great partners here in our community. So I think we need a small think tank to make sure this happens because it could really play a part in what types of businesses we can attract to Santa Cruz and what businesses will stay. Great, thank you. Okay, that's, we asked all the questions right there. We did it? Okay, so that was our first round and now I believe the schedule says it is time to break and mingle. And what that means is everybody in the audience, I know you are all very curious now that you've heard some of the opinions. You all get a chance to meet each other and talk about things. And then on our side as moderators, we're gonna think about follow-up questions to ask and we're gonna look at the Twitter feed and see if people have been asking things and we'll also ask the candidates if there's something that they wanted to answer, especially if it was a question we already asked but you wanna come back to it or we asked somebody else we didn't ask you. So just talk to us during the break. Okay, just wanna recap on things really quick. If you would like a question that you, or if you'd like to submit a question to be asked up here, you can tweet a question to the hashtag cruiseboats. They will be displayed up here as well. So if you're just interested in that, may or may not. But the candidates will see them and that's what's important. Okay, I'd just like to make quick comments. In terms of the minute, the quick pace of the questions, I gotta say it's great to watch the candidates have to answer under this kind of pace because if you're at a city council meeting and you're actually at public comment, that's exactly what it's like to be up there, not have enough time, we wanna talk about a lot of the things. So just putting that out there, it's great to watch. And without further ado. Actually, this one, the first question is gonna be one of those hand raising questions that was so exciting last time. And now we've done one, yeah, right? So we know the audience is gonna get to raise hands and the candidates. Okay, so here's the question. Should the city handle homelessness primarily as an economic issue or as a moral issue? And we're saying how should we handle it? We know that you can see it both ways. But how should it be handled as an economic issue or a moral issue? Okay, the second thing doesn't heal me too much. No, we don't question the question. They're supposed to be challenging. So, okay, so economic or moral. Okay, show of hands, how many think it should be treated as an economic issue? It's hard. These are hard questions. Okay, and how many is a moral issue? Ooh, I see people who've raised their hands twice. And that's no fair. Okay, we're gonna go with that. You know, you don't get to do that. Okay, and now, oh yeah, no we are, but sometimes we have to vote yes or no, yes or no, don't we? So anyway, now, audience. This was such a challenging question that some people frankly on the candidates forum weren't really able to do a yes or no. Let's see how the audience does. Should homelessness be handled as an economic issue or as a moral issue? How many say economic issue? Okay, and how many is a moral issue? Okay, so we had a good number for economic, but moral had more, I would say. All right, good, thanks very much. Okay, we're gonna kick off our second round of questions here and we were just joking, or not really joking, but talking to ourselves to say the round one is really about having a good time and round two is really about just crushing everyone's dreams, so. At least you're crushing them equally. Yeah, absolutely. And crush the egos, please. Okay, so here we go. My first question is for Don Lane. And my question for you Don is that we have a very beautiful city and also what could be a very beautiful river. And I think most or many people in this town would agree that it's being underutilized in many ways and what would you do to turn that river from a liability into an asset, both economically and environmentally? I think we're really right in the middle of doing that. I think I want to just say that about a year ago, some really active people in the community approached the city council and said, come on, let's really make a change there. And the city council public safety committee, which I'm a member of, met with those neighbors and really started brainstorming. What are some of the things we can do? And I think we've seen some real change this year. Some of the things that have happened are, there's been a lot of cleaning up and mowing and managing the landscape better. It's been activating San Lorenzo Park. We just introduced the Frisbee Golf thing there. There's been some new stuff painted on the levy path that makes it kind of more of a race course, a running course for people. I think those, we've increased the patrols of the first alarm security just to kind of keep an eye on things. And I think all of that is what it's going to take, plus demonstrating this community, we've built confidence that more people are welcome there and they will be. Thank you. So this is for C.C. And this is our hand raising question, but I'm going to do you the benefit of rephrasing it slightly. How can we balance the sort of fine line between looking at homelessness from both an economic and a moral perspective? Like I said earlier, put the unity back in community. So how do we balance it? I'm a very big advocate of the 180, 180 project and I'm an advocate of mental health case workers downtown doing assessments and finding out what the needs of the people are. I mean, I don't know what to do exactly. I don't have all the answers to homelessness. I believe that homelessness is not an issue. It's not a problem. What the problem is is people with behavioral problems. Whether you have a house or don't have a house, if you have a baby or a problem downtown, then that's the problem. And then we need to address it. That's what the 180, 180 project addresses is behavioral problems. And so there we go. We've got the hand raised and I'm going to stop before the elephant makes this noise. All right, thank you. Okay, and this is a question for Jake. A lot of times we talk about all the Santa Cruz brand and people mention all the great things about it. Surfing, outdoorsmanship, beautiful climate and geography. What does our brand lack? That's a tough question. We don't lack, I wouldn't say we lack anything. What we lack is kind of a structure of how we can take all of our attributes and put them into one brand. We had a question last week is what is Santa Cruz brand? And Steve and I said Surf City, but everybody had their other ideas of what Santa Cruz is. But I don't think that we lack anything other than we need to do a better job of kind of bringing them all in and kind of... No, we don't actually need to bring them all in. We need to... I don't want to put one brand on Santa Cruz. I don't want Santa Cruz to be kind of a community or a union of free thinkers and people who kind of come together and celebrate their diversity and celebrate the fact that we all live in this beautiful place and to just brand it with 8 Seconds Lab would be kind of tough. And I think that the brand of Santa Cruz is just a community of free thinkers. Okay, so I have a question for Steve and it is along the lines of our hand raising question whether you want to consider homelessness and economic or moral issue or both. What are new strategies and tactics that the city can adopt to handle both homeless issues and safety issues in our community? Well, I've been fortunate enough to be involved with a couple of different organizations that are looking for transitional opportunities for the homeless folks. The Association of Faith Communities, we are looking to establish satellite shelter programs to get people off the streets to give them an opportunity to be able to kind of get themselves together so they can really go to that employment application or they can get the driver's license back or they do the kinds of things they need to do to get back toward being able to enjoy their lives and maintain their integrity. I've also I'm the director of the homeless versus legal assistance project. And so I provide pro bono legal assistance to the entire homeless community. And because there are so many obstacles to their being able to get back into the mainstream to be able to transition from reduced circumstances oftentimes not even of their own making. Into kind of a better place for them. I think the one thing we don't understand about the homeless community is that two thirds of the people are homeless tonight in Santa Cruz were Santa Cruz residents before they became homeless. These are our friends and neighbors. That's what makes it a moral question just as important as an economic question. Thank you. So this is for Cynthia. And this is kind of, we have another question about brand but I'm gonna frame it just a little bit differently. How do we balance our local needs with the requirements of our tourist economy? Well, tourism is our largest single tax generator. Not necessarily the largest job creator but it is the basis of our, the taxes when you take all of them together that support our city services. So let's just put it on the table. Tourism is really important to us and our visitor industry supports a great deal of the subsidiary food and beverage and the retail shops and so forth that we depend on. The other thing I think that's very important to realize that people brought up about the emerging specialty food area of the arts. I think we're seeing that there are many more opportunities in terms of tourism visitor services with other sectors, whether it's active sports or birding in Watsonville or food festivals, whatever. There's a great richness here wine tasting, whatever. All of which supports this kind of diverse economic base that we really enjoy here at Santa Cruz. So I don't really see necessarily a diversion except when it comes to maybe just the impact and high season crowds and I don't have time for that. Okay, this is a question now for Micah. So Micah, currently over 30,000 people commute over the hill and many of them are going to high tech, high paying tech jobs and we call this the brain drain. What would you do to improve the quality and quantity of high tech jobs in Santa Cruz? Well, we talked about burying those cables under the rail trail. I'm hoping to help shovel out that rail trail so I can get an extra shovel for another little ditch there. So I think that broadband question is totally pertinent. To that, I also think some other questions about keeping employers here, when we have a successful high tech company, how do we have them not migrate? And I think some of that solution is about the cost of housing. I mean, all these things, it's a good question because it wrapped up with so many other things. So the way I think we reduce the cost of housing, which also helps for the economy is to loosen up some of the ordinances and restrictions about both housing and commercial activities. For example, right now, if you wanna run a little home business depending on what it is, you have to provide parking, $40,000 for a garage. Who parks in their garage? Like, does anyone in this room park in their garage? I mean, so we have these kind of ordinances designed to sort of protect a suburban lifestyle, which make it, which inhibit our economy. And I know that's not directly related to your question, but all those kind of things are related. We have to make it affordable to live here and work here. Okay, so I actually have the same question for Pamela, which is currently over 30,000 people commute each day over the hill, especially to high-paying tech jobs, which we call brain-train. And what would you do to improve the quality and quantity of tech jobs in Santa Cruz? Well, actually, I was one of those people for many years. I drove over the hill for six years to work at a software company called Baratoss. And I'm delighted to be back on this side of the hill. But one of the things I think we could do is work with people at Nex Space, people at Cruzeo and UCSC, and find out what some of the emerging markets are and partner with them, especially UCSC, because they can best tell us what's on the horizon, what's new, where's their emerging market, what could Santa Cruz be known for? We could create business enterprise zones. We could maybe get some incentives for UCSC students. We could keep talent local. And we could be a hub for something new, new technology. Great, this is for Rochelle. So we have some baked-in assumptions about what our brand is, the things that come to people's minds immediately. And yet we have this sort of growing community of people working in technology, working in the robotics program up at UCSC, the gaming program. How can we leverage those programs and those trends to sort of evolve the brand of Santa Cruz? So let me understand your question correctly. You're looking at the people graduating from UC Santa Cruz and figuring out how that can be our brand as opposed to being a tourist. How can we augment our brand? How can we evolve our brand to be more inclusive of these technologies and really the deep sciences that are coming out of the university and its affiliates? Well, I think one of the ways to do that and to make sure, and this is something I'm very interested in, is figuring out how we keep some of those video gamers here in town to hopefully create businesses here instead of going over the hill. We have one quarter of the cost for renting office space right now in Santa Cruz compared to Silicon Valley. So I think it's really important that as a city, we make those folks aware that there's an opportunity to start a business here and it probably will be much cheaper. Once again, it goes back to broadband, I think in order for them to feel like they're part of the culture here in Santa Cruz. We've got to have that or we have to have buildings like Cruz IO with that type of access to it. That's one way to do it. In terms of wrapping it into our tourist brand, I'm not sure how that would help us as a town in terms of attracting more people to come and play here. Thank you. Okay, so we finished that bunch of questions and now we're gonna have another yes or no question. Okay, so UCSC has long planned to expand into the virtually untouched North Campus area, including the diverse and endangered second-growth forest, Chabrelle and Meadows. But we're also talking about how important UCSC is to us and our economic success and we'd like to work with them more. Are you in favor of restricting the UCSC upper campus ecosystem from campus expansion? Are you in favor of restricting it? Some restriction or complete restriction? Yeah, that's a good question. Santa Cruz has absolutely no authority, no legal authority over UCSC. We have state land, private state land. They'll be good to know you're in favor of restricting and you can get anything about it. Right, so are we saying some restriction or a lot? Some restriction. Okay, so yeah, I guess how are we in favor of putting pressure on them or trying to restrict it in some way? Okay, who wants to restrict voting? Yes, we should be restricting UCSC on their upper campus development, okay. And who's saying the other way? Let's not restrict. I know it's terrible, frustrating, isn't it? It's a great agreement. But I would just say the comprehensive settlement agreement was a lot. Bacon. Okay. We will, we will. I support some restriction and I would help make it happen. Yeah, okay, good. Right, no, I know everybody and that's what we were thinking. This one was a popular question that we were asked as. So, okay, audience. Who's in favor of restricting the growth in the UCSC North Campus? Okay. And who's in favor of not restricting it, letting the university grow? Okay. Yeah, every time you ask it's a little different I know. But, you know, it's a complex question, it's true. Okay, and that time I thought we had more people who were in favor of restricting, but we still had a good number who were in favor of last restriction or no restriction. Okay. Okay, so yeah, before we move on, I know a lot of these questions are confusing to people and a lot of the times you feel like there's nothing you can do about it anyways, but these are the questions that voters wanted to hear answers to. So, whether you can do anything about it or not, they still want to know what you think. So, okay, so my next question is for Rochelle. And that question is, what can we do on a local level to bring energy independence directly to Santa Cruz citizens, site a specific example of how we might build a better local energy infrastructure? So, we're talking about creating, let's say our own energy source internally, is that what you think the question's getting at? No, but how can we bring new forms and energy independence directly to Santa Cruz? So, whether that's RO and it could be RO or it could be from elsewhere that's not. Well, in town, we already have several solar companies that have great financing programs where you don't even need to put money down and it ends up getting wrapped into your energy bill. So, I think those are great opportunities. In terms of the city, there are incentives that the city has for doing everything from buying low, excuse me, I'm sorry, I'm getting my words mixed up, everything from low flow, water type devices, low flow or low use energy devices, there's just, you can look, there's so many models around the country that we could look at to see where you could do better than what we're doing now to encourage people to use less energy. Thank you. This is for Pamela, and it's actually the same question, but I'll try and slightly rephrase it. How can we encourage our citizens, both sort of financially and through education to adopt very direct measures to conserve energy on their own and perhaps to generate energy on their own? Well, I think anytime you're trying to encourage citizens, there needs to be a financial incentive, typically. So, I've seen that with PGD when you buy a low use refrigerator, you get a kickback, same with toilets and water, you get a kickback. So, I think that we would have to put out some city-wide information about how we could partner together to reduce energy. Okay, and this one is for Steve. Can you think of a development project that either did or did happen that shouldn't have happened or didn't happen, but it should have happened? And can you discuss that? It's just a decision that went poorly. Well, I've always thought that the way that we handle a lot of the project was just simply in mismanagement at the beginning. I think the conversation has to start on that again. I think we have to re-approach the Coastal Commission. I think we have to look at new developers. That's a project that's just a blight on the beachfront. And it's $700,000 of revenue in our tax base that we don't get every year. Now, why that's happening, I don't know. But what I would do in city council, what I intend to do in city council is to start that conversation anew and start it immediately because the lobby here cannot exist as it is and we can't have that kind of a whole revenue stream. Okay, I have a question for Jake. This is pretty wide open, my man. What is the number one issue that keeps you up at night that needs to change in Santa Cruz? Well, I'm glad you asked that question because the number one issue to me is that when you walk out of your front door, there's a chance that someone's gonna be in your front yard. And my car was broken into two weeks ago and they stole my tools that I used to provide for my family. I'm a carpenter and they stole tools out of my toolbox. And then very next night, I went out to go get some frozen yogurt for my wife and I found somebody trying to get into my truck. And I didn't want to confront them obviously because I'm just not confrontational. But I called the police and unfortunately enough, I never saw a car come by at all. And the guy wound up leaving when he knew that I put a new lock on my toolbox but that's definitely what keeps me up at night when I fear for my family's safety. Another thing that keeps me up at night is that. So let me actually delve into that question a little more so public safety is an issue for you. What's a new way, what's a new approach that we can handle public safety as a city? Well, last night we were at the Santa Cruz neighbors forum and I think more organizations like that that could be put together and getting more people involved and starting their own neighborhoods and neighborhood watch programs. And that's something that you can do on your own. But I mean, the big thing is is that the city needs more revenue through responsible growth and development to provide the police department with the funds that it needs to get the job done and to really clean Santa Cruz of its crime problem. Okay. This is for my time. So how can digital technologies enhance public safety and what are some of the risks of relying on machines and algorithms to manage our security on our behalf? Well, my dad just got his bike stolen in the Metro so this one's for you dad. And his suggestion is to make a little cage around the bikes and put a camera up. Not to try to lock the cage in some way but just so that people walking in and out of the cage were seen by the camera. And the risk of that of course is that that information we misuse to put people in little boxes to guess who's doing what or to sort of have class bias affect people. So the Santa Cruz police department is getting some international recognition for what is sort of being built as a pre-crime program where they're using analytics data that they collect off of our activities through these devices to model who and where crimes are most likely to occur. And this obviously has some very interesting and nuanced ethical considerations. So this is much beyond the camera. When the camera can recognize your face, it's sort of a different situation potentially. No, I'm familiar about that program and I'm hopeful about it. You know, I don't think it's kind of a be-all end all. I know we're talking to the technological crowd but you know, the cops know that in my neighborhood, there's a lot of crime already. I mean, I live in the lower ocean neighborhood. You know, and if they had sufficient resources or sufficient tools or we were organized enough as a community, we would be stopping crime in my neighborhood. So I think it's hopeful. Hopefully we make their work more efficient and I support it. We also need to look at societal solutions. Great, thank you. Okay, and this one is a question for CeCe. And same question that I was asking Jake before. Can you think of a development project that either should have happened and didn't or did happen but shouldn't have? And can you talk about that, describe what you think should have happened? Oh man, I want to answer a different question. I think it's use my minutes anyway I want, right? Well, there was this project that probably nobody remembers and there's a bunch of houses that were built right off the lighthouse in this small little cul-de-sac by the old Morello High School and there was no low income housing, no measure J, no measure O houses provided there. And I was really upset that was something that happened. I don't know how many years ago that some of these guys might remember but once you let a developer build a housing project with 10 or more houses and not allow a measure O housing which is the modern low income housing in there and you cut some other deal for some other housing somewhere else because you want to put the low income people in the ghetto instead of in the nice neighborhood by the West Cliff that to me was unconscionable in that whatever city council was there they'd cut that deal. And I'm still a little bummed out because there should have been a measure O house near West Cliff. Okay, so I have a question for Don Lane and that is regarding public safety. This question is, are you in favor of using digital technology and specifically our new predictive policing system here in the city and whether it be that or something else we would like to hear one concrete example that has not yet been done of how we can improve public safety. Wow, I have to do both those in one minute. Okay, on the predictive policing I actually think that's really a useful tool for the city. I think it's some of the implication there is that this is person based and if it was I would have a problem with it but the reality is all it does is say here's where we want patrol cars to go and check. We have a reason to believe that that street or that neighborhood is more likely to have a crime occur than anywhere else in town and we should make sure we spend a little more time being with our patrol cars being there. So I do support that notion. In terms of an additional public safety thing for me, one of the things even though often it's not thought about as public safety I do think it really is addressing homelessness in a more comprehensive way. We all talk about the issues of homelessness and crime in the same breath so many different ways we do that and so it's gonna take a comprehensive approach to homelessness that will end up addressing some of the public safety issues that we face. And this is for Cynthia. So this is kind of similar to the previous question about technologies. Should we allow software to watch our behaviors and make decisions about those behaviors? That's already happening. You all know that and I think the vast majority of what's happening is way out of the hands of the Santa Cruz City Council. That's a national debate and we don't have any clue how much is being gathered about what we do by think, click onto, et cetera. So would you say that you are generally opposed to that trend or fearful of it or is it something that you anticipate and feel that we will have to address as a community in some form? We have to address that as way more than a community, I think, yes. Well, and yet we're bounded by our regions and our access. We have to deal with that. The issues of personal privacy and what's connected in terms of all our internet activities is something I personally have concern about. I don't think that platform for dealing with that is the Santa Cruz City Council. In terms of other information, it was mentioned surveillance cameras and so forth. Actually, I have supported those in public places and those have been proven to be very useful in capturing images of crime in process, identifying perpetrators and leading to convictions. So they're two different issues they do have to do with recording personal activity, the others in a public space. Thank you and some of these questions are not specific to the council. Okay, now, I know you guys didn't like the previous yes or no question. I like them. Some of them are good. I know some of them are not perfect, right? But this one is really good and I promise you'll all like this one. So, yeah, that would be a good one. Do you like ice cream? I like that one. But is that controversial now? So, as we explored, now we've been talking about how important it is to encourage the tech industry in Santa Cruz. That's a thing near and dear to our hearts who are the moderators and the people who set this up. And we talked about how important it is. As we explore the development of the tech industry and we look at the success of the tannery which provides housing to local artists and that's working out really well to have that kind of a center and affordable housing for artists. Would you be in favor of having a tannery for tech? About in a second. Okay, who says yes? And who says it would be like the housing for like the tannery, only for tech? Work, live? Oh, yeah, work, live. No one would be able to sleep, right? They'll sleep even. Well, we don't sleep. That's all I thought. I was just checking. In tech, we cannot sleep because people call us and say that their computer doesn't work. Okay, so now the audience. What do you guys think? Would you be, how many are in favor of having a tannery center for tech? A lot of people. And how many are not in favor? Okay, that's great. All right, and now on to the last bunch of questions. Okay, so I have a question for Cynthia and we already discussed our term called brain drain which is 30,000 people commuting over the hill, especially in high tech every day. What in your opinion is the most important piece of legislation that could either be passed or struck down to help combat this? Legislation, whoa, I'm just gonna shift gears entirely because I wanna talk about something that I think has been productive in keeping intellectual talent here in Santa Cruz and it's one of the side benefits of the comprehensive settlement agreement with UCSC and that is a much higher level of communication and cooperation between the engineering and tech and business departments at UCSC and connecting the graduates while they are still graduates with the business community here in Santa Cruz giving them business opportunities and also working with tech transfer cooperation and cultivating that and it's neither the city's responsibility nor the university's but when they work together, they can do a great job on that. Very good, I'm surprised we haven't seen that move sooner which has just changed the question. You wanna encourage us. You can do that? It's risky. Jake, so the question is how can the city better use social media to both engage the citizenry and to have more effective governance? Well, I think the city's website could use a little to tune up, I think it could be more accessible to social media where you kind of log into your Android or your computer and see what's happening right now like things streaming live in the city, what somebody's kind of applying to do what the new freshest ideas are that you don't have to wait for the next day for the paper but wait, sorry, I don't even understand the question. Social media, everybody's... I'm starting to kind of try to change it. Twitter's, the Facebook's. Yeah, you too. This is how we'll change it. If I'm a city council member, it's one thing I've already planned is I wanna use Instagram and Twitter to keep the community up to date with things that I'm doing in the community that's gonna directly reflect their lives and their family's lives in our whole community. So yeah, if I'm on city council, you're gonna be seeing what I'm doing. I'm gonna be using social media. I'm gonna be doing a lot. Thank you. Okay, and this one's for Rochelle. So Rochelle, this is a question that's been around before. Looking at developments that have happened or not happened in recent years, what's one that you think either should have happened but it didn't or it happened and it was a boondog or just shouldn't have happened? I absolutely believe the lava here project should have happened. I think that would have enhanced our beach street area greatly. When you look at the businesses around the lava here, they've all upgraded, they look beautiful. It's becoming a really nice street and a place that I wanna go if I were a tourist but then you have this, you know, blight sitting there. It's ugly, it's run down and we can argue about why it is that way but the fact is that would have been a very appropriate place for a high-end hotel. It would have been beautiful but it would have employed people who live in the nearby beach flats community. There was a specific program offered to those folks for training to come in and work and when you look at the jobs that have gone because of Wrigley's and Lipton's, I know that we can't bring those back but at least we could have maybe put a dent in what left with those industries by having the lava here down on Beach Street. A few more questions here. We're getting to the end. Just to remind you all, we did say this round was much more about crushing ingredients in the first one. All right, so I've got a question for Don Lane. Oh wait, not crushing any juice. Don, what would you do to make Santa Cruz more attractive to new tech companies? To new tech, sorry, no, just to tech companies, new world? Well, I feel like people have said some really good things about this. I think getting greater broadband access around the community is really critical to that. Another is, and some of this is happening that like the Delaware edition, creating new physical spaces that are up to date and really ready to receive tech businesses in them. A third which Peggy knows more about than anyone is making sure that because we're not gonna have a lot of new growth and a lot of new big buildings, if we really make this, and the city is really making progress here, make it easier to repurpose buildings when a building was in an old industry and that industry's fading, let's be able to transform that building into something new that would be, and really be upgraded and then be suitable for tech. Great, this is for CeCe. So I've lived in Santa Cruz for 20 years. My commute is 75 minutes each way. My wife-to-be drives a Santa Cruz twice a week and is able to somewhat work remotely otherwise. For the first time in our lives and our tenure in Santa Cruz, we're thinking of moving, basically to spare our backs, our cars, our fuel expenses, and to try and be a little bit more sustainable. Can you tell me, preferably with some rational and actionable message, why I should not move away from Santa Cruz? Well, there's certainly more to life than money. We live in the most beautiful place. Can you tell that to my mortgage lender? Yes, I will tell that to your mortgage lender, absolutely. I'm happy to meet with anybody, anytime, on any topic. And we're gonna rebrand Santa Cruz as Santa Cruz IO, first of all, if that's the name branding. We are going to have a marketing strategy called Santa Cruz the Game. So gamers will want to stay here and you guys will want to stay here. And it would be similar to like geocaching, right? That's a game, we can do that in Santa Cruz. So I am trying to answer your question. But basically, my grandson is here in the audience. And that's what's important to Santa Cruz's families and working together and doing the next right thing. And I can tell you, the Bagelry restaurant that started, I worked with that guy and when he went to get a loan at the bank, they wouldn't give it to him. He sent his wife in, dressed up nicely instead of him. He looked like an old hippie guy and he got the loan. So mortgage lenders can be negotiated with. Thank you for a few drinks. Okay, this one's for Steve. And what do you think Santa Cruz's brand lacks? What could we really use in our reputation that we don't have? You know, I think Santa Cruz is a wonderful, artsy, progressive, beautifully laid back community, but it needs to have more of a technology forward-looking brand. You know, I really think that we need to make ourselves mecca for new technologies, new ideas, new entrepreneurs. I said a couple of years back that I thought Santa Cruz next and next base were really the incubators for our young entrepreneurs. And now I can have Cruz go to that as well. We need to create a more of a technology economy in Santa Cruz to supplement our old style sales tax and tourist and utility tax economy. But in order to do that, we need creative ideas. We need creative people. We need people who are willing to assume the larger dream. And I think in this room, you have people who are willing to take that up to assume that larger dream, to make it a reality and make us the kind of technology town, the technology economy that really is gonna benefit us and is gonna make us a little bit more forward-leaning and we would have been without that. So that's what I'm for, the big thinkers are here. Help us make that economy a reality. Okay, so I have a question for Micah and Micah. I would like to know what type of growth and development do you see as positive for Santa Cruz and how would you work to promote that? Well, I'd like to see a web designer in every garage and a farm stand on every block. We have twice the entrepreneur average of the country and we have an amazing sort of farm garden culture and I'm proud of it and the city is only in the way of it. You're not actually allowed to sell vegetables from your local garden or farm and if you wanna start a small business in your garage, you have to crawl under barbed wire, especially if there's anyone that might visit you in a car. So that's my vision for an economy, just like have the government step back a little bit, bend some rules, revive some structures and let our creative juices in this city flourish. This is for Pamela. So tell me about some of your specific ideas for facilitating tech transfer between the university, between business and between our civic institutions. Tech, technology transfer. Sorry, sorry, technology transfer. Well, I think it's all in the relationships that the previous city council has established and constantly get the community involved. I mean, when you hold a meeting, you could talk to some people in this room and say, where do you work? What do you do? Here's what the city wants to do. Let's create a partnership and figure out how to accomplish more. It's all about partnerships. And say specific to the talent that we're creating at the university. Yeah, the talent at the university specifically is around science, is what I'm understanding we're rated third internationally. We're just behind MIT and Princeton in international research and development, which is just huge. So we need to find out what that development is about and maybe establish some places like research facilities that can provide employment. I think that's the end of our examination. Do we have time, my man? Or are they going to keep us out? Well, I have one. We're just about out of time. We'll give each of you 40 seconds. Go down the line. So we're on the timer. We'll start at that end. You can answer any question you want. Say whatever you want. Well, Robert has been out of town for a while. Well, Robert's doing that just to say, you know, okay, good, here we go. Micah. Hashtag SCVisitor. It would be advertised to our visitors on all the, you know, downtown association, visitor council, city website. And when you got out of town, you could look up, send a tweet to hashtag SCVisitor. We also put it on, you know, like where you pay for parking. And then all you geeks could be constantly engaged in this amazing, cool conversation that the tourists and visitors could clue into. The commercial applications could also, you know, post things and do small tweeters. And the whole thing could be like this ongoing conversation that could really enliven the town and engage the tourists. It wasn't my idea as Andrew Mullins, but it sure is. Okay, Rachelle. So I'd like to tell you why you shouldn't move out of Santa Cruz. I worked at Apple computers, Steve Jobs came back, eliminated my department. So if I'd moved to Cupertino, I would have been really sad because I would have been there without a job and I'd be away from my beloved Santa Cruz. Another reason you shouldn't move is more and more people are able to work from home. So think about that as an option, 75 minutes a day, or it's actually one way for you. I was in my car, yeah, I was in my car two hours a day and it does stink. If I only had to do it one or two days a week, it'd make it a lot more bearable. So hang in there and everyone I know who's moved from Santa Cruz wants to come back. They want to come back. They're desperate to come back. So consider all we'll have before you go. Thank you. So there were two questions. And one was about farming and one was about our levy. And so I think we should host farm to table dinners along the levy periodically as a way to bring the community together. Because growing up, I had a lot of community functions I went to and I feel like that's getting lost. I think that's a fantastic way to celebrate our levy and our farmers. I don't remember what the question was, but here's the answer. Okay. By leveraging the things we do well, right? Arts, tourism, education and nature. Innovating, attracting people to bring their ideas here. Like TEDx, shout out for TEDx. It just happened last week. And that's a great example of raising the level of the dialogue and getting people together to solve problems. Continuing to encourage people to work together to solve problems that like I said, put the unity back in community. And my grandson is here. He went to kindergarten last week and he said, I'm half black and half white like Obama. And he visits his grandma's name on the same ballot as Obama. I'm trying to cover a whole bunch of things. And look at it, Hillary. Hillary has this great idea about putting food trucks on the levy. Has a great way to enliven the levy. I think that's a really excellent idea that I hope we can work on. One thing about, or a couple of things about our brand that need to be approved. I love our brand in so many ways, but there are two fundamental things we need to work on still. One is our transportation system is just, that's not a good part of our brand. We need to innovate and really figure out ways to effectively move people around the community without having more carbs. And the other piece is about housing affordability. This is a problem that this is a very expensive community to live in and we just gotta work hard against that. There are three things to invigorate the levy. One, you encourage people to have more business-facing, levy-facing businesses. There is a single-edit-facing business now. We need to encourage that. Number two, we need to reconstitute the San Lorenzo River Commission, which Sunset had some time ago, so we can get people involved in the community about what they think is gonna enliven and enrich that area. And the thirdly, what the heck was I gonna say? A thirdly or something else that I wanted to do. Anyway, let me talk about affordable housing. The reason you stay here is because if you go out here in the front, you'll see that Steve Plage talks about affordable housing. I, when I'm on council, will have an entire affordable housing plan that will be providing for moderates, new low-income housing. The reason you should stay in Santa Cruz, I'm gonna make it affordable for you to do it. A whole lot of great ideas that have been thrown around here about we should do that, we should do that, and we should do that, and we should do that. And the reality is the city council has very finite resources. The city of Santa Cruz has finite resources and a lot of expectations and a lot of obligations to its community. So the city, per se, on its own is not really gonna do any of these things. And when we are able to do them, whether it's in terms of economic development or affordable housing or social services or supporting the arts or working with tech to make it a more inviting environment, those all require partnerships. They require partnerships with other public entities. They require partnerships with nonprofits and with the private sector. And no single one of us is gonna know all the answers. So I say, what I would bring is what I've brought in the past, is a willingness to listen, a willingness to partnership. I'd love to have your vote. Check out my website, www.syntianathues.com. One T in Matthews. Took some of my 40 seconds there. No, I just wanted to say thank you guys for putting the event on. And thanks all of you guys for coming and letting us voice our opinions and kind of make you more familiar about where we stand on key issues and just thanks for coming out and being concerned in the community. And is there any ice cream left or did I miss the vote? All right. Well guys, that's about it. I wanna thank all the candidates for coming. It was amazing, just give them a round of applause. Tried to put on something different and exciting and maybe put you on the hot seat a little bit and hopefully we did all three of those things as well as give you a good form to speak. So thank you to Santa Cruz Next, Cruz IO, Santa Cruz Geeks, Civic Nomics for coming together and putting this on. And thank you mostly to the citizens of Santa Cruz for showing up.