 Welcome to a new edition of Rational Politics coming to you from the Captain's Lounge Studios. I'm joined today by Sean McCoy, who is running for Councilor-at-Large right here in Longmont. Sean, welcome to the table. Thank you, Nigel. So let's start off, talk a little bit about your background. Okay. Okay? Well, I've lived in Longmont all my life. I went to school at Central Elementary and at Longs Peak Middle School. And yes, when it was a middle school, I mean junior high, not middle school. I went to Longmont High, go big blue. And I have a degree in political science and a master's in education. I married a friend that I've known for 40 years, Marino Bryan. She was the snotty-nose little sister of my locker partner in high school and in middle school. I have two beautiful daughters, Claire and Molly. They went to Silver Creek, Claire graduated in 2014 and Molly graduated in 2018. I served on multiple different boards and commissions from the Planning and Zoning Commission, the Housing and Human Services Commission, the Police Standards Board, and Boulder County Open Space Board. Before I got on Council in 2007 and was elected to City Council in 2007 through 2011, I served on different boards and commissions during that time, like the Airport Advisory Board and the Art and Public Place and the Museum Board. And then I ran again and I lost. And I'm a high school US government teacher and I often teach my students the idea that if you can't emotionally handle a loss, you probably shouldn't be in politics because it's not a guarantee. And so my experience there was I had a loss. Well, I didn't just waste my time waiting and looking at my wounds. I went on and I got on the Historic Preservation Commission. I served on my school district's DAC committee, this District Accountability Committee. I took students all around the world to China twice, once in 2013 and once in 2016. I've taken students to Greece, Italy and Spain and to the Eastern Bloc countries. And so I got a perspective of how the other half of the world lives and learned a little bit from that. And when I was in 2019 before the pandemic hit, I took a course called the Working Families Party Training where it helped me have a better grasp as a community leader of what I can do to help minority groups and women in our community. So I feel like I am really on top of that. I've been a small business owner as a landlord and I am the future business leaders of America teacher advisor at my school and also board director to the state of Colorado, which my job here as a board director, I represent St. Vrain schools, Boulder Valley schools, Westminster schools and clear down the chat field. You kind of ruined my second question because I was going to ask you what your qualifications are. But I've got a funny feeling you pretty well covered that. I just have a few. So I hope I check all the boxes for most people. I think you probably did. Is there anything else you'd like to add to the qualifications aspect? Anything that you think you'd like to talk about? Well, you know, I come from a family of people that have been involved. My father, Tom McCoy, in 2000, in 1983 in the spring got elected to Longmont City Council and he's the longest serving city council member in Longmont's history and he stayed on until 2005. Prior to that, he was on the planning zoning commission. And so I always felt like we always had it at sort of back and forth in conversations like some fathers might talk about football and baseball and basketball. He and I talked about, you know, what was going to be good for Longmont. And so I was raised on this and know, you know, what Longmont seemed to always care about and feel strongly about. So I feel like I've got a great grasp of that. A great grasp of the town, the politics of the town. What do you feel about the way the town is expanding so rapidly? It's about 100,000, excuse me. We might be pushing 120 and I think we have a service area which means people coming from NYWAT, from hygiene, from lions and other places that come here to do their shopping and entertainment and even some of their employment opportunities and stuff like that. So, you know, we've grown at a pretty remarkable pace and I would not say that it is healthy to all of a sudden put an abrupt halt on any of that and that's certainly not my policies or ideas. But I do feel that we have to talk a little bit about, you know, what type of development we want here. You know, we have to be conscious that, you know, with the Colorado River Compact we're not going to renegotiate that. That would be if farmers say they're now losing 25% of their water supply here because of what had to happen just in the last few weeks about reworking that and making sure more water flowed down through the Colorado to California, they would lose probably 50% of that if they reworked that because people in the East have no connection to how important water is to Colorado. So, I was speaking with a NASA scientist the other day and he was explaining that his idea is about, if we're at 100,000 today, you know, where do we need to go? What is the right amount? The one thing I want to express to everybody out there that might be listening is that the clientele of a city council member here in Longmont is not those that might come and live here. It really is those that live here right now. And sometimes it gets lost on that. But if we figure out, you know, we only have a certain amount of water, we only have the ability to build a certain amount more and where we want to go with that, then I think as a community we can all agree how quickly we want to get there. That makes an awful lot of sense because one of the things that has always worried me, I remember the drought that we had, what, 10 or 15 years ago. I can't remember now exactly when it took place. And then we were only running at about 80,000 people. And there were certain things that went on during that drought that worried me a lot, like the watering of the curbs, but of course we're now trying to get all of that grass taken up and made more natural, which is a good thing. But we kept on growing and growing and growing. And I see the town growing rapidly, but I don't see the infrastructure keeping up with the rapid growth of the town. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I think people are divided on the idea of like growth in regards to like maybe another athletic center for activities like the center down at Quill Road near the museum in the pool, where that would go, how soon we should build something like that. Because people do have a desire to have those sort of amenities. Yes. Or they're going to go somewhere else. And the other thing is, is just how that impacts our schools. Boulder Valley, where I teach, is starting to lose students to places like St. Vrain. St. Vrain appears to be on a growth pattern where Boulder Valley appears to be shrinking in population size, student population size. And of course, the pandemic didn't help with that. And of course, where I teach at Monarch High School, the Marshall Fire wiped out a thousand houses in that area. Many of my students and some of my colleagues and folks there. So that had an impact on where I teach. Let's assume that you get elected. Okay? What are your priorities? My first priority would be, of course, to talk a little bit about things that are bothering people like, you know, how do we provide housing for our workforce? How do we provide housing for our children that would like to come and live here and can't afford to get into the housing market and have that American dream? And the second thing was to talk a little bit about or think about, you know, really what we can do to help the least of our brothers, those that are homeless in our community, and what we can do to help them. But after Tony Humley, a neighbor of ours, growing up, we lived on between second and third on gay. And he was between second and third on Pratt, right over near Old Mill Park. And, you know, he was a cherished artist here. But on council, the first time he was the photographer that took my picture. And I see his son, Mark, at Target all the time and say hello to him. But after his death, I feel that one of the best things that we can do is work on our pedestrian and street safety. And I think the first thing I would do is to put in a pedestrian and safe streets, act, or ordinance that address some of the issues that people are really struggling with. I know that some folks I talked to, Sally and Dave on Mountain View near Harvard are frustrated on how fast people drive. And at one point we had temporary roundabouts there. And I think maybe that was slow because they're told that they won't put in dips and they won't put in bumps. So maybe we need to put something, the city won't. So maybe we need to look at roundabouts and maybe the speed exhibitions and drag racing that occurs in the summer months in the evenings at Airport Road. We need to do something else like that. There are people that are complaining in the very fact that you'd have to walk like in Tony Humaley's case. You know, he wasn't going to walk four blocks down, find the cross block, cross, and then come down. So we need to probably talk about more neck downs, which have a tendency of slowing people down, and also more crosswalks on third and in places where it would be logical. We need to put in lights like we have at Gay and Ninth that are pedestrian lights. You probably have seen these flashing lights that are at different locations in different cities like Boulder, right there at Whole Foods and Pearl. The pedestrian can push the button and they flash. Well, we have signs on Main Street between 1st and 9th that tell people to slow down and that people will, that they're supposed to stop and let people cross. But just the other day my wife was crossing to go to Main Street Optical and almost got ran over. She got into the middle of the street and then somebody just wouldn't stop. And so those types of things are simple things that we can do. And I understand people are going to say, how are you going to pay for that? And when I was on council before, we had a discussion about red light cameras. And Boulder has them and Fort Collins has them and all the other larger cities like that surrounding us have them. And although people complain and say, I hate them, I hate them, what it does is slow people down. They stop trying to run those lights. We have places like Nelson and Hoover that are some of our most dangerous intersections and our most incident. I don't like to use the word accident because when people use the word accident it implies that it was unintentional. When you run a red light, it's intentional. You are feeling that you are in a rush to get from point A to point B because of something you chose or something else that happened. Or they just weren't paying attention. Exactly, exactly. So I think we need to do some of that and fix those things. I think we need to do a little bit of education for the people of Longmont. Maybe run on our cable, run on our websites about when you are a pedestrian, where you should cross, when you are on a bicycle. If you are riding on a sidewalk, you need to get off and walk your bike across. When you ride across, you are actually a vehicle in the intersection. Right. And so people don't know that. You know, one of the things that frustrates me a lot living here in Longmont are the cyclists. They seem to pick whichever side of the road they want to ride on. Some want to ride on the sidewalk. Some want to ride in the middle of the road. Some want to ride on the wrong side of the road pointing straight at you. And you've got no clue what they are going to do next. I think that comes down to this. When I was in China, I talked to our tour guide both times about this particular thing. In China, the drivers are first generation drivers. And so they had always rode their bikes and they kind of go like a flock of birds. And so now you see how they drive there is kind of like a flock of birds. In the United States, people are so used to driving, and everybody generally has that access to driving. So they ride their bikes as if they were driving a car. And sometimes those two ideas just don't mix. They just don't mix. I think that's part of the education part, to just kind of make people aware. But also drivers, you know, using proper etiquette and reminding them because we have people like myself that I haven't taken a driving test since I was 16 years old. And so some of those things, I've probably myself even have bad habits. And if we just remind people of what are the plight and the good habits to have, you know, it's the idea that you turn your turn signal on even though no one's behind you or even in the intersection. And that sort of mindset, I think we need to work on people. Do it 100 foot before your turning. I don't need to know that you have successfully navigated that corner. I don't need to know that. Do you have any final points that you'd like to raise at this time? I just want to stress my life experience here, my dedication to Longmont. I'm dedicated to Longmont 100%. My children are growing. They are moving into their own adulthood. And my wife and I want to be more contributors to Longmont. She currently serves as the chair of the Callahan House. And I just absolutely adore this community. You talk to some of my friends. I have a friend, Jake Sager, his family owns the Imperial Hotel on 3rd and Main. And he currently lives in Denver because he manages his other properties there. And he always says, oh no, here it comes. McCoy's going to talk about how wonderful Longmont is. And so, yeah, if any fault that I have is that I just absolutely think this community is wonderful. I love living in Longmont. I really do. It's a great little community, great town. There's so much to do here. I love the theaters, good shopping, great little community, great people. Absolutely. Great people here. And we have to speak easy. Yeah. Well, if I could just kind of show people so that they see, if they see the silhouette sign on the road in a yard sign form, they'll know that's me. And my website is www.McCoyForLongmont.com and I appreciate your support financially. And please vote for me. Sean McCoy. Sean, thank you so much for coming into the studio today. Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure meeting you. All right. We have to get you back on this table because I want to talk about education with you. Sure. I want to talk about the Constitution with you. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. We have a couple of shows. Bit of a throg. Sorry. That was fascinating. I've said this before. Please, please, please go out there and vote in November. Doesn't matter if you're a Democrat. Doesn't matter if you're a Republican. Doesn't matter if you're an independent. Vote. Voting is what counts. Voting is what keeps this country running along successfully and correctly. It has been an absolute pleasure talking to Sean. Sean, I've got a funny feeling we're going to see him down in the studios quite often. Everyone stay safe out there. I'm Nigel Laves, your host, signing off for Captain's Lounge Studios. Thank you.