 Alright, I'm Lindsay Dayton Berryman and I was born in Chicago, Illinois, actually Evanston, Illinois and moved to Minneapolis with my sister and parents when I was two and a half. The oldest of six children and grew up on Lake Minnetonka in a little town of 5,000 called Deep Haven. My parents were active in city government. My mother was a city councilor and my father city council and mayor and I learned, I did a lot of community volunteering through them. One story I love to share is my mother was on the Minneapolis Red Cross chapter on their board of directors and when it was time to go out and raise money for the Red Cross she would grab up her six children and throw them in a van with a bullhorn on the top and she'd put Red Cross arm bands on her arms and hand us containers for money and Red Cross emblem on that as well. We were to bring two or three friends along and she would tell us when you go through the neighborhoods, ring the doorbell and say, please give generously to the American Red Cross and she would go up and down the streets with her bulldog saying the same thing. So those kinds of events were what I grew up with community was very big in my family and so when I went through life later that came up very strongly with me. I want to share a couple other things one in high school we did those aptitude tests and I came I tested as a mechanical engineer and I'll never forget Mr. Dears telling me that girls couldn't be mechanical engineers so I should think about nursing and that was a flash point for me that didn't feel good. I got into nursing school and found the love of my life. We got married and the nursing school said they didn't want me to be in the nursing school as a married student. I was their first married student and that was a flash point. I stayed with it and then of course got pregnant and they weren't happy about that as well so I agreed to take a time out at six months because I wasn't supposed to show to the patients. So they didn't want their patients at the hospital knowing that a woman could be pregnant and work at the same time or be in school at the same time. So it was a big moment when both of us graduated him my husband from medical school and myself from nursing school that I carried with me as well. We spent three years in Germany while he was in the service and another learning experience for me there was understanding another culture. We lived on the economy which means we weren't on the army base in the army base but with the people in their village. I put my children in the village kindergarten and one day one of the village women came knocking at the door saying we're going to be playing foosball and would you like to be on the team. I thought they were inviting me but as it turned out one of the moms from the school was inviting me and they were picking their teams and of course I was last to be picked and neither team wanted me. So Marga the neighbor who had recruited me said we'll take her on our team and I asked if it was the first time they played together and they said oh no they picked the same team every year and also they lost every year and I told them they weren't going to lose this year I was very good at what they called foosball was dodgeball and I began to teach them how to play. We did have the first game right there when we had recruited our teams and I gave the team some quick tips on give the ball to me and I'll get the person out. I was very athletic and I said and if you're in the middle and someone is right handed you jump to the right and if they're left handed you jump to the left and then change it up every other time. We wound up winning that game. We won all the two games during the season and the next year when it came time to pick the team the other team got the toss and they picked me and I said no I'm going to stick with my team. So it was an interesting cultural experience. I also learned that with good knowledge and self determination and a feeling that you knew what you were doing you could be a good leader and people would follow no matter what culture they were from. So that was an oh yeah moment for me. By this point we had three daughters and that's what I wound up with three daughters we didn't have any more but they all spoke German by the time we went home to the states. We wound up in Oregon my husband doing a residency and then found Medford in 1974. We loved Medford because of the mountains and the streams and the lakes we loved to hike and experience that. We loved the downtown and the fact that they were honoring their heritage and they had a Carnegie library and Bear Creek ran through the town was all very intriguing to us. So we loved locating here and within two months of buying a house and settling in we were up in the hills housing started to develop around us and I went down to City Hall and said what's going on and the planning director was Jim Eisenhart excellent planning director shoved a comprehensive plan toward me well it turns out that cities had just been required to develop comprehensive plans and according to a state law that had just been implemented and I looked at this inch thick document and said can you just earmark what you want me to read in this and he earmarked the transportation element which was the policies and goals for transportation planning in the city of Medford along with the other elements which I did get to later but in reading through it I realized that the development was being developed without following the comprehensive plan. So I was a little bit incensed by it because we'd found the space that we wanted to live in for the rest of our lives hoping we would have a little bit of relief from neighbors and nature which I absolutely loved and I went looking for an attorney well I went to four attorneys and none of them was willing to help me they all were helping developers developed Medford and they didn't want to be tagged for being someone who was against development in the valley finally someone suggested John Eads who was a former city attorney who had actually written Medford's comprehensive plan and John Eads became quite a mentor to me he also Grottis helped me form coalitions helped me identify what the avenues were to address what was happening in my neighborhood and we wound up filing a lawsuit against the city of Medford for not following their comprehensive plan during all this I had heard that water runoff was going into the Lone Pine area so I went down talked to some of the people who were upset and formed a coalition with them I started a coalition in our neighborhood and also heard that Lazy Creek was expanding and breaking down backyards of people in the Murphy Road area the Lazy Creek area and I formed a coalition with them so we had three areas of concern that we took with us when we went to the city council we wound up winning our lawsuit against the city of Medford it was a precedent setting case in the state of Oregon for land use applications at the end of this lawsuit I can remember sitting at home thinking about what had just taken place and thinking if these yo-yos can do it so can I and at that point I determined I would run for city council backtracking a little bit some of our investigations had found that there was a corporation that was called the Robin Hood Corporation that owned a lot of the lane land around the home that I had we had purchased and the property that was being built and one of their board members was actually on the city council had been engineering the move to get the property quickly developed because they were realizing that the land use laws were going to inhibit their their plans for the future I got a team together and we recalled that city councilor because I felt that was not corrupt government but not quite really on the up and up and that was one of the reasons that I felt I wanted to run for city government and my self-righteous personhood gave me a lot of well it made me angry but it all the anger also incensed me and and made me determined to try and set things right at least make some changes in city government the lawsuit left me with lots to think about at the same time I was finishing up a business degree at Southern Oregon University I had gone back to get a degree because initially my nursing degree was a diploma three-year diploma which is what most schools were offering at the time that I went through nursing and now we're requiring a four-year degree in order to be more validated I'm going to say so I got a degree in business and graduated just a week after the lawsuit consummated and then within a couple years I started a woman-owned business called the Cookie Connection and I had that business for 16-17 years initial initially the first location was in downtown Medford but expanded to the Roe Valley Mall and actually there was one at the Medford Center too that was initial so Medford Center in downtown businesses I started with a business partner Caprice Moran and then when the Roe Valley Mall came to town we recognized that that would be taking a lot of the traffic and so we opened a Cookie Connection at the mall as well. Caprice my business partner got pregnant had a baby and decided she wanted to be a mom so I bought her out after three or four years and managed the business myself so I also ran for city council and I used a lot of the people who were part of my coalitions when I filed the lawsuit when we filed the lawsuit against the city to be on my campaign team so I had from the Lone Pine Group I had supporters in Ward 1 and from the Lazy Creek Group I had supporters in Ward 4 I had done a lot of work with the West Medford Coalition and I found support from that group as well I had supporters from the Manor because I was on the Manor Board at the time and so I was finding I had a lot of support from many parts of the city but they helped me put together my campaign for city council which was in Ward 4 we started in January meeting I put together Kitchen Cabinet in February in March I put together an advisory team and by June I was declaring we had a slam dunk team that we were focused and we knew what we were doing and I was getting all sorts of input from the community you'll never beat Mel Winkleman he was running against me he's a strong businessman and very powerful and I said to myself just watch me because at that point we had our team together we were organized and we were moving and I did win that election and served six years on the city council and it was really good background for me on how city government worked also had my woman-owned business at the same time that was expanding and at this point I had four units the one downtown a one in the Medford Center one at the Rogue Valley Mall and then one at the newly developed Southgate actually no I take that back that one was another four or five years off my girls were teenagers now my three girls were teenagers and my husband called stop on me he said you're you're in too deep you've got too much going and you're not able to do well on any of them so pick what you want to do pick one that you need to let go of and I said well I love my business and I love the city council is it okay if I give the three daughters away and he said no that should be your number one so I said well okay so I resigned from the city council it was very difficult to do it was I was in the second term at this point and I've always felt like I needed to see things through to the end and it was hard for me to step away but it did give me time to reflect and to get the business organized and moving better at the same time I had Otto Fromire come knocking at the door Otto Fromire was also a good mentor that I had through my years and Otto said I've been in the Fromire Deathridge building which was also the theater at one end for all my business life and I don't want it torn down I want you to save it and I said Otto I can't save the theater unless I sit on the theater board well it was four o'clock when he was in my office and by 4 30 he called me and said you're on the board and we're meeting tonight at 5 30 so at 5 30 I show up at a meeting and I find that the rogue gallery and art center um has been given this building and asked to restore the theater they had no money they had kind of looked at the theater as a stepchild they didn't have money to deal with it the roof was leaking it needed attention badly and Otto Fromire sat at one end of the table and Dunbar Carpenter sat at the other end and while they both wanted the same thing to happen they wanted to restore the theater they they were coming at it from different directions and they were never going to get there because they were fighting each other on how to make it happen so I went back to Otto the next day and I said to Otto in order for this to occur you need to step off the board of directors he was a gas of course and I explained to him what I saw happening that I looked to putting together an advisory committee and that I would have him on the advisory committee and that we needed to have our own 501c3 and step away from the gallery because the gallery didn't have the funding to do anything and we'd have to raise the money as our own 501c3 to turn the criterion around which is what happened and I put together a really good steering committee uh and Otto was the head of that steering committee and he gave me a lot of tips on what doors to knock on and how to raise the money in the meantime the board had to put together a business plan for our 501c3 and identify what our goals were and what we planned to do with the dollars we were raising so um after five years of my life uh knocking on doors we managed to raise the money needed actually within two three years we raised the 2.2 million that the architect told us we would need and as they started to um make the changes and renovate the criterion theater SMB James uh Tom Hall came to me and said the architect didn't do um core samples and none of these walls can stand alone there's only one that we can leave remain standing everything's going to have to come down and I said how much more money he said three million more so um I had just said thank you to our development team and uh I was looking at having to go out and find three million more dollars um at the time I had stepped on to the urban renewal board we had identified I think something like nine or ten programs or projects that urban renewal would be um implementing during the 20 years of its existence I'm in a segue a little bit because uh on that board I had talked with other board members and suggested that if we took an arm down to the south interchange and put those lands in our urban renewal district um we could develop those lands they were all in public holdings so held by the city the county the federal government all had big parcels of land there that we were able to accumulate at no cost develop and because of tax increment financing all the taxes that came out of those properties we could uh use to develop downtown Medford so this was happening at the same time that we are raising money for the criterion and I was able to go to urban renewal when we got to this point of oh my gosh we needed three million more and ask urban renewal if they would um put six hundred thousand in which they agreed to do I went to Len Hanham and asked him to get some money from the state another six hundred thousand came from him um you know slowly we pieced together uh more and more until we had four hundred thousand to go and I had nowhere to go but to the city of Medford who were poo-pooing this whole thing all along and um what I found was they just wanted to be asked and I went to the city manager initially and I said I'm going to come to the city council and ask for final four hundred thousand dollars and he said it's not coming out of my budget and I said I'm sorry I'm still going to make the ask and he said over my dead body I said I'm still going to make the ask so I went in front of the council feeling very unsettled like I had absolutely no support and um but I had lobbied each of the council members independently and given them the story and when I got in front of them I said I'm down to four hundred thousand that's all it takes to make the criterion theater the centerpiece of downtown Medford and I'm counting on you city fathers to do this and they voted unanimously to give us the money so that was a hurrah day and um the criterion moved forward urban renewal was able to move forward um we did a lot of projects for downtown on the urban renewal board which I'm really really proud of there was a parking structure we brought RCC into the downtown we built Jackson County Public New Public Library and the criterion theater the library RCC the criterion theater and then later when I was mayor was able to work with Elizabeth Zinser to establish a higher education building in downtown all were part of or continue to be a part of along with the rogue gallery and art center a cultural education district that urban renewal uh saw as one leg of the stool of rebuilding downtown Medford a second leg of the stool was a civic center and if you at the time we had the county courthouse and the city hall but we identified that area as an area where all civic buildings should cluster and we now have the juvenile facility there we have the Jackson County um uh I'm blanking courthouse yeah but also the jail and um the city hall has done some expansion now they've expanded their building uh into some others that were close by they built a parking structure and health and human services uh came in and took over the post office when they moved out so that whole area was a second leg of this stool for urban renewal the third leg was to develop headquartered businesses and uh we went to Harry and David but they had already developed a headquarters uh south of town and weren't willing to come in we went to Lithia and Lithia the younger generation said we want to be in downtown Medford and it was the latter part of urban renewal when they built their headquartered building and then one west main came in this was after my time but it also was a part of the thinking where we've got um pro-care software is uh nationally headquartered building uh we have prs specific retirement services uh which is a national organization that's headquartered in downtown Medford and then a rogue disposal which is not national firm but they do um wonderful works and they have developed a methane gas methane gas to power a lot of the odots vehicles their rogue disposal vehicles and also um rbtd vehicles so they have been letting other communities around the us know how they can how those communities can take their garbage turn them into methane gas and power their own vehicles which um i give them five stars for so life gets kind of messy it goes back and forth um and we have to i go down one track with one group of people and then i have to come back and go down another track with another group of people what the medford city council in 1988 decided that it would be a good time to form a an urban renewal agency and at the time um i was not on the council uh was paying attention to business and paying attention to my girls but when i saw them forming the urban renewal board i felt like this was an opportunity for me to get back into government without being on the city council without having to run for office a lot of what i was picking up from the community was that people had a low community esteem they talked about dreadford they talked about deadford um they they didn't see medford as the lovely place where i'd come to settle down and i i couldn't understand it because it's a beautiful valley and we have so much to offer there didn't seem to be any uh appreciation of those that came before us of the ranchers or the timber barons or the orchardists um while we love the pair blossoms there wasn't an appreciation of of all the the people that came before us struggled with to make us the valley that we are today and for some reason medford felt because they didn't have a shakespeare festival because they didn't have a brit festival they didn't have anything to be proud of and what they weren't recognizing as a community that that i saw is so important to us was that we were the financial hub of southern oregon and northern california we were the medical hub of southern oregon and northern california we were the business hub of southern oregon and northern california and you know we were providing a lot of the basis for jobs and creativity on a different level than shakespeare we were looking at creativity in our businesses and how we can expand our job opportunities and provide for families at the same time you could go into downtown medford at the cross of medford of um main and central and stand at that corner and say you know this is where 40 50 60 years ago people would stand and they'd talk about you know horse trading and who was having the babies and who married who and who died it was where all information was being exchanged and it was really the heritage of our southern oregon beginnings and we needed to take it to heart and appreciate it and hold it up and feel good about ourselves and so on the urban renewal board we're looking at those pieces of our community and how we can raise them up and feel proud about them the preterian theater people felt really proud about because the whole community participated in raising those dollars lin sholan came in and he formed a community organization that went out and helped us find hundreds of thousands of dollars that brought us to our goal uh so it wasn't one or two the effort of one or two people it was a community effort it was a building block for downtown and it was seen as a cornerstone for uh downtown medford's uh revitalization so as we worked through urban renewal it was a district so you can draw a line around urban renewal and where the line is is where urban renewal either stops or starts and the city stops or starts and as urban renewal would put in a sidewalk it'd stop at that line and the city wasn't a bit interested in picking up the building and extending it further the same with sewer lines and water lines and uh any kind of infrastructure uh was hard to implement those changes because they would stop at a point where it had old infrastructure and we had to figure out a way what was going to work what wasn't going to work what we needed to address what we couldn't address and had to put off for later um and I learned very quickly that we needed to have a vision for the city of medford as well as the vision that we had for urban renewal and I took the lessons learned at urban renewal and um decided that I would run for mayor and I would run on the platform of a vision uh for the future of medford and um and I would go back to those people who'd participated in all that we had done whether it was the lawsuit to improve our neighborhoods and get our roads in order and our storm drains in order or whether it was our cultural uh groups that wanted the criterion theater to be a prominent piece of their life I went to all those organizations that felt and saw their life reviving and you could you could see and feel this new um sense of we're okay coming up through the people so um I'd been in business now for 16 17 years and I put the business on the market I thought if I run for mayor I might win and um I'm going to have all eyes on me everybody's is going to be the first woman mayor for the city of medford and everybody's going to be gauging me against my male counterparts so not only did I have to do things really well I had to do them better than really well everything I did I had to do better than really well because I was being watched closely and people were talking about it and I was also setting the stage for other women in the community who might want to follow suit they might want to be on the city council they might want to run for mayor they want might want to be a publisher of the Tribune or you know head of RCC or Southern Oregon University which we did have in place we had females in place at that time but but it was a time of where women were unsure of what they could do and what they couldn't do um they weren't feeling comfortable that they could challenge the male system or move into a position that would have been held by a male and feel comfortable that they could do it as well they needed to be uplifted women needed to be uplifted as well as the community and I sensed that and so I sold the business and um got my ducks in a row um I went throughout the community to put together an advisor advisory board made up of all segments of our community and a medical personnel that was on my advisory team I had someone from business I had someone from small business as well as large business it's someone from the service sectors and the mental health department trying to get a cross section of the financial world the you know the cross section of Medford and who we were give me input as I ran my campaign for mayor on what was most important and we were able to put together a whole list of issues that could be addressed when I was speaking to the community and to community members but we also ran on a theme of vision leadership results which we were recognizing is what the community needed as a whole to pull them up further to self-actualize in essence as a community and um this group was very important toward helping me turn around and speak to the people that I was addressing that were residents and members of the community and be able to go to a certain segment let's say we went to talk to the doctors or the nurses that person that was on my advisory team was giving me input on how I needed to address them so that I could change my way of seeing that fabric piece of the community what they were doing how they were contributing and how I could encourage and what what we could do better find out from them what what can we do better so each segment of the community that I spoke with I was garnering more and more information about what our Medford was all about I ran on the thesis of vision leadership results but I also told community members as we went along that we were going to have a vision for the city of Medford and that would be the first thing I would do when I stepped into office after I was elected mayor I had a plethora of people come in to me with their ideas and their expectations and their hopes and their dreams and it was like no one expected me to win but everybody hoped I would it was amazing to me it was amazing to the community and I turned into the city manager my first day on the job and said we have to get this vision document going and here's what I want to do I want to when we do our state of the city address which is done by the mayor's office every year in January in front of the chamber of commerce I want to present that we are going to implement this vision and and and get it moving at that time so we put together an initial presentation and I can remember standing in front of the chamber of commerce and saying do you feel it do you feel it just put your minds at ease and listen to your hearts do you feel it do you feel that we are going to be a different community soon I said I feel it I see it in your eyes I know that everybody wants to see this happen so I want you to take a business card out right where you want to see the city move what what you want captured during this vision visioning process and leave it on the table I had 350 business cards came in to me we had 350 participants in the visioning process we worked through the school district and we had 600 students sending in their either pictures or comments or hopes and dreams for what they wanted for the city of medford and the skate park was an outcome of that so you know we listened to all segments when we did this visioning and it took a year and a half to go through the process and we got a document vision for medford in the 21st century and the thought occurred to me it's easy for these things to go on the shelf and be forgotten so I went to some of the leaders from each of the groups and I said what do you think about putting the vision to the budget and I had I think six or eight who felt really strongly that that needed to happen so that it wouldn't be forgotten it wouldn't be left on the shelf so I got a team I think it was like 15 people steering committee to come together at a city council meeting they presented the idea the council approved it much to the city managers dismay because you have to recognize that the city manager's job is to put together the city budget the council's job is to identify the policies and the different constituencies needs and then the city manager figures out a way to finance it well this was a whole strategic plan on a vision for the 21st century for the city of mentford every single department of the city was impacted from public works to parks to even departments like cultural education that weren't a part of city hall and we had to put figure out how to put a budget to it and then each department had to identify how they were going to implement their budget that was probably the smartest move of my whole career right there in a nutshell because it did require that the city of medford follow through on our vision and implement it that at least for the time I was in office and for probably the next 10 years afterwards so as we go through this I'm sitting in my office I'm in my office every day usually for three hours sometimes morning sometimes afternoon depending on um when people needed to see me I would always get someone waltzing in the door saying I have a vision mayor I have a vision so Elizabeth Udall came into my office I think it was like March of 2000 and said I have a vision Lindsay I have a vision and I said what's your vision and she said it's of an arts arts and flowering festival in downtown medford that I've seen one in the northeast and I think we should be doing one in medford as well and I said I think it's a great idea Elizabeth and I know who to hook you up with because a couple other people had also been thinking of some kind of an arts festival in downtown medford what Elizabeth did was pulled our cultural issues in the smudge pots that we had in the orchards and she suggested that we commissioned artists to decorate them and and sell them and that can make money for the festival continuing we could decorate the artist's renderings of the smudge pots with flowers around them and so the idea was to sell floral displays as well as focus on the arts and it was a fabulous festival and it's still going today very exciting another visionary that walked into my office was Elizabeth Zinser who was then president of southern organ university and she told me that she had a vision of having a higher education building in downtown medford that would bring southern organ university and rcc together and hopefully at a time in the future organ institute of technology and climate falls which since they've have put together a three-way agreement on sharing their studies and their students and their administration so that was a fabulous outcome but that higher education building was part of our urban renewals cultural education district so we added it in that space area where where we had already started building our cultural education district it was a fabulous addition many many people felt emboldened I'm going to say to come into my office with their visions and I think that's the vision document and the fact that we went out to the community it was their document it wasn't my document it wasn't city hall's document it wasn't the mayor's document or the council's document it was the community's document and they continue to find ways to make met medford a better place to live one of the initiatives that urban renewal had identified in their list of 10 or 12 whatever it was was bear creek dam if you looked at bear creek dam back in the 80s it was full of shopping carts and dirty socks and dead fish and puns come and it was not a pleasant site nor was it a pleasant smell it wasn't something that I felt proud of and I think no one in our community felt proud of and so we made it one of our initiatives for urban renewal and we determined that we needed to take out the jackson creek dam the dam was making it hard for the salmon to swim upstream to spawn it was collecting the trash that people were throwing into the creek so we started having cleanups around the creek they'd already been doing cleanups but we increased it tenfold and urban renewal began the process of working through trying to take out the dam we wound up having to work with 14 governmental agencies from city to irrigation districts to the state to the federal government and when we finally got to the point where we could take out the dam secretary of the interior babbit came to town and recognized this as being one of the first communities to take a dam out and he got to throw the first hammer at it but I had the pleasure of having Eric Ditmer call me and saying several years later a couple years later Lindsay you've got to come up to lazy creek I said where are you he said I'm on the corner of Black Oak and Barnett and come look come look and hurry so I hopped in the car and went over there and there were salmon spawning in lazy creek and it was the first that they had spotted them and that was a very rewarding time for me personally because I did work hard on that initiative the creek was looking so much better it was cleaner it was healthier people were more excited about getting in and taking out the blackberry bushes and replacing them with indigent in placing them with plants that that were inhabitants that should be there anyway indigenous there we go sometimes it just doesn't come so that was an initiative that became a focal point of urban renewal one of the things that is being talked about today and honestly Eric Ditmer still calls me to come down he does his classes along Bear Creek he still calls me to come down and talk about how the dam came out with his students I was coming to the end of my second term of office and thinking about whether or not to run again and I thought about my mother always telling me walk away when things are good Lindsay don't wait for it to sink in front of your eyes do what you can and turn it over to someone else when things are at a high then you'll feel good about yourself you'll feel good about what you've done and you'll have in your own mind accomplished what you can accomplish and so I thought about that and I also thought about the fact that I had a city manager who was a bully and every single day that I went into city hall he would find a way to bully me I brought it up to the city attorney and he said I see it Lindsay I'm sorry but I'm hired by the city manager and I can't help you I suggest you go and hire your own attorney I thought I'm not spending money on this issue so I went to Barnes and Noble and looked in their book section on how to bully the bully and bought the book and when I turned around with it in my hand to go check out there was a city attorney looking at me and I held up the book and showed him the title and he nodded like I think that's a good idea I know that every meeting that I was in that was an executive session that wasn't being publicized whenever the bullying would occur I look at the city manager and I could tell by his body language that not the city manager the city attorney I could tell by his the city attorney's body language that he was uncomfortable with what was happening I would call the city manager on it but I had no counsel support on this issue so um after struggling with it for a long while I decided I wouldn't run for a third term and it was a hard decision for me to make because I loved what I was doing but I kept in mind what my mother had said leave on in a high so that's what I did I left on a royal high well we have a younger population that we need to turn the downtown over to I'm working with a woman Abigail Schilling who's opened a medford cooperative business that is internet and you it's a membership base and you buy a desk and you plug in your computer and do your business and you come and go as you need it and you know at at first I thought oh my gosh I can't believe this but she's 80 full today during the COVID and during the fire and she's managed to be a going concern which is fascinating to me so we need to look at how this next generation is doing business where they're doing business how they're doing business and have our our downtown and our business community focus in on it and make the changes they need to make I mean I see men my age in their 70s who have buildings downtown they can't fill and it's because they don't know how to market them they're they're stuck in my generations thinking and unable to adapt or adjust to the current generations way of doing business so that's one of the things that I think we need to do is is gather them up and find out what's important to them a lot of them like to live in the downtown so we need to be building more housing up above storefronts or business fronts we need to have more restaurants that they can eat out I'm I'm amazed at how much they eat out I make everything I grow my vegetables I make soup out of them I freeze it for the winter but they're eating at restaurants um so the whole way that they live these days the style is different and um you know we need to address that we need to learn about it and address it and make our community work for them you know I'm a believer in urban centered growth and so you know I don't I don't think that the urban growth boundary needs to be applied as strongly or stringently as it is I think that when we need land or we need more housing we can build up instead of out I'm a proponent and saying Medford you're a growing up city now let's look like one let's have more um high rises with apartment dwellings in them let's make them six seven eight stories high you know instead of going into the hinterland and taking up more land and building more single family houses um I think that's what this younger generation's looking for as well more urban centered growth they want bicycle paths and bicycle lanes in the downtown Abigail's got a space in the back of her shop where you bring your bike in and and you know it's a whole room full of bicycles nobody's using cars uh they're biking everywhere because they're conscientious of the environment and the air quality and you know pedestrian movement I've had several high points of my life the cookie connection was definitely one I loved being in business I loved helping the employees find themselves a lot of them were young girls they would come when they were getting ready you know last year of high school and looking at what they were going to be doing a lot of them had low self-esteem their education wasn't doing for them what it could have been they didn't feel good about themselves their home life was poor several of them I found sleeping in the cookie connection and found out that they'd been kicked out of their homes they were sleeping in cars um so you know actually my husband accused me at one point of having a social service business not really a cookie business but um I I figured out that what they needed was to have a job and to be able to say they could do something worthwhile I started putting together scholarship programs for the girls or the employees really who had worked at least six months and um so that they could go to college and several went to RCC uh one who was extremely talented went up to Oregon state came back after a term and said I can't do this you know it's it's not me I don't feel comfortable with it I asked her if she would feel comfortable with a culinary arts program and she said she was willing to try it so we enrolled her up in Portland at their culinary arts school and she graduated was hired by Intel for their food service and then after that she was hired by Marriott to head up their food program and then she opened her own business in Portland um a little in downtown Portland a little food service kind of lunch early dinner business and uh wound up getting into the catering business and now has a very high end extraordinary catering business making more money than I could ever imagine making um that feels really good so that that is a highlight in my life I I helped several women get into business themselves um and uh used the knowledge that I had gained from having a business of my own to help others move forward so that was one highlight and another highlight was urban renewal I loved the downtown I loved seeing it grow I loved seeing people people spirits come up from the ashes from things that were deteriorating and not being tended to shame on the city of Medford for letting that happen but yay for urban renewal and then the city of Medford for pulling it up again it's a constant roller coaster we have to constantly remind ourselves that we have to go through that visioning process to reconnect as a community and it needs to be done as a community a vision for one isn't really a vision has to be shared by everyone and I think that was also a highlight for me was a shared vision during my mayoral years so what's next who knows I do have a woman-owned business that I import purses from Italy Italy and um seldom uh be opening uh I open pop-up shops around town and try and keep active in my senior years so I don't know that's it I can't think of anything else you born me out thank you for your yeah you'll have to mince it together and make it work for your story you're welcome