 And welcome to the last event in Longmont Public Media's debate series for the 2021 City Council elections. I'm here with Marsha Martin today. We'll be conducting an informal Q&A because Marsha is running unopposed. If you're interested in Longmont Public Media's other content related to the 2021 City Council election, you should go to the youtube.com slash Longmont Public Media. There we have interviews with all of the candidates, videos where they introduced themselves, and also recordings of the debates that were run by Longmont Public Media this past week. Marsha, thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you for having me Shaquille. So because Marsha is running unopposed, the format that we'll be doing today is I'll be reusing some of the questions that we asked the other candidates during the debate. Marsha will answer them to the best of her ability, and I'll take the liberty to ask a few follow-up questions. Marsha, are you ready to begin? I am. I'd like to thank everyone for watching. I'm Marsha Martin. I represent Ward 2 on the Longmont City Council, which is the whole south side. And I'm very glad to be here and have the opportunity to talk about my ideas, even though I don't have anyone to debate, which is sort of a disappointment, but not that big of a disappointment. All right, Marsha. My first question for you is, the three most crucial challenges facing the City of Longmont and what are your solutions for addressing them? Well, if they had solutions, they wouldn't be the most crucial problems. But there are two kinds of crucial problems, first of all. I want to say there are urgent problems and there are critical problems. Many problems are both. Our most urgent problem is the housing shortage, which is leading to an increase in homelessness. Our most critical problem is climate change and the need to reduce our carbon footprint and use renewable energy for everything we do. Excuse me. So while you may not think that, you know, if these problems were solvable, they may have already been solved to your point, but do you have proposed solutions for some of these problems that you'd like to quickly address? Absolutely. So let's take the urgent problem first. We have really three things that are stopping Longmont from improving its housing inventory. The first is that we are having a really hard time moving projects through the permitting process so that we can get them out of the ground. And there are several reasons for that, but the biggest one is the second issue, which is that we have failed to align our inclusionary zoning ordinance with our ordinary land use codes and failed to adjust the Envision Longmont goals to reflect our newer understanding of what the architecture of a landlocked city that has an economic future really needs to be. It's all around urban density and making sure that workforce or attainable housing is in much higher supply than it is now. We're starting to get a handle on affordable housing or subsidized housing. I would say within two to three years, we will have made huge progress on that because the Longmont Housing Authority is under better management and it is funded better than it ever has been before. So we expect as many as 2,000 new dwelling units in the next two to three years and that's going to take a huge amount of pressure off Longmont's people at the low end. Can you address how aligning the inclusionary housing ordinance with the overall goals of the city will help make this process work better? Sure. What happens now is that if a project is exactly what Longmont needs but it runs a fowl of some land use code or another, for example, the ratio of parking, onsite parking for a multifamily unit to dwelling units, then it gets hung up in the permitting process and it tends to go around and around in circles. And everyone knows that we really don't need that much onsite parking if you've got an apartment building that is right on the bus line, that is mostly studio and one bedroom apartments. Nobody's going to have three cars, but the formula is based on some incorrect assumptions about how many cars people are going to want. So we need to fix that. We need to fix it in the land use code. And we have people in permitting and people on the planning and zoning board that were trained to follow the code at a minute level and they're not going to stop doing that, so we need to fix the code to align with their expectations and get these projects out of the ground because they would make a huge difference in terms of the available supply of housing and how balanced it is with the needs of the public in Longmont. So what one thing would you do to make Longmont a more livable city? I would encourage people to get out of their cars. People think that Longmont has really bad traffic congestion. If you compare Longmont's stats to nationwide statistics, even for towns our own size, we don't. But we have a couple of hours a day where our traffic is annoying. It's not really deeply congested and those are the commute hours. Yeah, so are you suggesting that people get out of their cars during the commute hours? I suggest that we make ourselves a city where people commute less. And that means that we're a city where you can live where you work. Commuting, especially for people of average and low incomes, who are the people who can't afford to live here by the way, steals time and it steals money and it actually lowers their effective rate of pay because they're paying to operate an automobile, paying to own an automobile, insure an automobile, making car payments. And if they lived in Longmont in an urban, dense, walkable environment, then they might be able to walk or bike to work most of the year. They definitely would not be on the exits and entrances to Longmont where the congestion is because they would be at work already. So everybody's happier. The employers are happy because their people are happier, the workers are happy because they spend less time on the road and more time doing things like bonding with their families and cooking healthy dinners and they have more money to buy healthy dinners with because they're not spending the money on their automobile. So a city where it's possible to live where you work and have fewer commuters in or out is a much more livable city than a city that is based on the concept of commuting. And I really want to say that in the debates that have preceded me, a lot of the candidates had it wrong because they were all talking about improving commuting and commuting isn't the issue. The issue is living here. So I happen to work in Louisville and I'm one of a lot of people who work in an industry that isn't super well represented within the city limits. I am probably going to work outside the city of Longmont for a really long time but I really like living here. Is there going to be a solution for people like me or is my solution going to have to be to leave the city? Well I certainly hope the city that your solution isn't to leave the city but in fact the commuting problem is not entirely under Longmont's control. I feel that we could make a deal with the regional transportation district to- You're talking about RTD. RTD, yeah. I try to not use acronyms but of course everybody knows it by the name RTD and don't know what it stands for. So anyway RTD has basically failed Longmont, right? They haven't given us the train. They keep trying to cut our intracity bus lines because they don't make much money even though Longmont subsidizes them. Isn't that because those buses suck? It is and that's part of the problem. They can't afford Longmont. They miscalculated. Bad things happen to them. I'm not going to get into whether it was bad management on their part or unexpected events in the economy or what, but the fact is they ran out of money before they got to Longmont and now they're trying to meet their basic commitments to Longmont on a shoestring. And so we get the oldest, biggest, stinkiest buses doing very long, slow routes through Longmont and it isn't good for anybody. It really isn't good for anybody except that unhoused people can get on them and stay warm, but that's not necessarily a good reason for running a big stinky diesel bus all around the town, although it's a solution that's been used before I've learned. So the thing that we should do over the years is negotiate with RTD to focus our taxes that we can't get out of paying to RTD on intercity solutions because that's the only thing they've shown any real competence at. And so if they focus on bus rapid transit into Boulder and if they focus on maybe partnering with Amtrak and the Biden administration and whoever it takes to finally get us some sort of a train, then, and get out of our way and let us come up with another kind of a solution for intercity transit, then it helps people like you, Shaquille, that are still going to get out of town and it also helps people who are on the work-live bandwagon because if we had a longmont-centric intercity solution, then we could have a subscription system where Longmont United Hospital, for example, could subscribe to a bus line and pick up its people and bring them to work right on their shift times. That would save everybody a lot and it would save a lot of traffic in Longmont. In the meantime, RTD would stop wasting money on a solution that is never going to be good for Longmont. They try every year to cut intracity bus lines and we always talk them out of it because we've got to have something and so it's really important to put money where it belongs and then we can have good intercity transportation and also have commuter transit that's appropriate. So you mentioned at the top of this that you felt like one of the most crucial challenges facing the city is the global challenge of climate change. So I'm curious what you think the ethical obligation of the city of Longmont is to limit carbon emissions in order to address the global challenge of climate change because part of the catch-22, if you want to call it that, is that while the city of Longmont would certainly have the ability to reduce its carbon emissions almost arbitrarily by regulation if it really wanted to, the fact is that it's a global problem. So does it really make sense, for example, for people within the city of Longmont to pay higher electrical rates in order to reduce our city's carbon emissions when everyone around us is going to go around than business as usual? Well, first of all, that isn't what's going to happen. Longmont's electrical rates are almost the lowest in the state, you know, the bottom four kind of bounce around depending on who's adjusted their rates most recently. But we have some of, we always have some of the lowest electrical rates in the state. What's going to happen as we make the renewable transition is that our rates will go up as we make capital investments at the regional level, the Platte River Power Authority or PRPA. They're going to go up a little bit because capital investments will have to be made, but it doesn't take very long at all according to the models for the rates to begin going down again fairly precipitously because there's no fuel involved when you have made the renewable transition. You know, it's free. On the other hand, natural gas and coal are going to get more expensive because the demand pattern for them is going to change. Has PRPA ever lowered electrical rates? No, and in terms of the faceplate dollar cost, they probably never will. But they have raised rates below the, or increased rates below the rate of inflation. In fact, that's going to happen this year, right? Is that our rate of inflation, which is going to be somewhere between 4% and 6% by the end of 2021, is going to exceed the PRPA's wholesale electric rates by a couple percent. That won't happen every year, but everybody needs to understand that lowering the utility rate is really a relative thing that happens with respect to what everything else costs. And if you consider the cost of breathing polluted air, breathing coal particulate, you know, the whole social cost of carbon thing, then we're always lowering electrical rates as we lower our carbon footprint. So one reason is that another reason is that we're going to get healthier, right? And I was the person who introduced the first resolution in the Platte River Power Authority service area, which consists of Longmont, Loveland, Estes Park, and Fort Collins. I introduced the resolution that said we're going to get to 100% renewably generated electricity by the year 2030, which was pretty aggressive in 2018 when it happened. And within the year, by the end of that year, all four cities had passed similar resolutions, which forced the Platte River Power Authority to go along because we owned them. And so they had to make an effort that they were actually reluctant to make to begin the transition. And the fact that an area like us can do that and make progress and maybe attain that goal when everybody else is still fighting about whether it's possible or not is going to be a form of leadership that can be copied by utilities across the United States. So can you speak a little bit about how you feel about the ethical obligation to fight climate change? You know, I think you've spoke pretty eloquently here about the ability to do so and the opportunities specifically afforded by the fact that Longmont's in sort of a unique arrangement by virtue of owning its electrical utility. But why should we? I mean, is there an ethical obligation or is it purely utilitarianism? It's for our children. I mean, are the ethics really in doubt? This is something that we have to do because the survivability of the kind of lifestyle that we have now really depends on our doing this and our considering ourselves to be in a race to do this. There are a lot of equity-based things that go along with it, right? We have an ethical obligation to find ways to create jobs in Weld County because if we don't do that, either there's going to be a famine when the extraction industry collapses or we're going to be drugged back by those people whose jobs depend on the extraction industry pulling back on our progress with all their might. And both of those things are happening now. You know, Weld County hasn't experienced a collapse yet, but other places in the country absolutely have. All the places that were dependent on coal, you know, so like in West Virginia and stuff, have already experienced that collapse. And we have an ethical obligation to mitigate the collapse and change people's hearts and minds in the process because, you know, right now the people that are dependent on the extraction industry kind of hate us. Ask me something else now. How would you address residents' complaints regarding urban noise such as the airport, trains and fireworks? You know, this is a fairly easy question and nobody's going to believe me when I talk about the solution. We have, based on the history of the last 18 months, made it really hard to be a police officer. You know, we've taken away protections from them for when they exceed their authority or use too much force. And I absolutely believe in that, by the way, because I think that although not in Longmont for the last 40 years, but earlier times and in other places, police have done that. So I understand why police are annoyed. We're also in a position where we have a lot of people who are really jealous of their minor freedoms and are doing things like putting straight pipe mufflers on their cars and getting fireworks that are illegal in Colorado and shooting them off all spring and summer. And those things may really reduce the quality of life in Longmont and it's too bad. And you take those attitudes and you put them together and it means that what we really shouldn't be doing is using patrol cars to enforce that kind of infraction. And you can detect that kind of infraction and document that kind of infraction with Smart City style automation. In other words, you can have noise monitors around the city that here and triangulate the motion of a car with a straight pipe muffler. You know, you can detect a car with whose rolling coal. And then you can just like on a toll road take a picture of the license plate and send the person a citation later. So what you're proposing is essentially that a system of microphones distributed throughout the city would have the ability to detect that sort of noise. Essentially, yes. How do I know, so I'm not necessarily, I don't think of myself as one of those people who's jealous of minor freedoms. But I don't know that I'm wild about the government having the ability to listen to everything I say on the streets. Well, the government doesn't can't hear everything you say because the microphones are tuned to the point where it doesn't even wake up the surveillance system until you're exceeding the noise ordinance threshold. And then all it can do is, you know, it's not taking video of you and it's not listening to what you're saying inside your car. Because we don't have any technology that can do that. I mean, I don't know, maybe there's some government agency scary somewhere that can do that. But we certainly are still fine tuning the technology that's just going to triangulate the trajectory of a really noisy muffler. But the probability of compliance if somebody who's not driving and who's not all spun up and is not interested in making noise at this moment with their modified vehicle gets a citation in the mail. They're much more likely to pay that than they are to be nice to a patrol car that pulls them over for it. And in the meantime, the patrol car can go follow, you know, do something more important, right? Be there when there's an accident, for example. So that's an enforcement mechanism. But that doesn't speak to the issue of deterrence because, of course, if you have the opportunity to roll through the city of Longmont for a couple of hours and make noise in your straight pipe car, you don't get that citation for what, a couple of weeks, maybe it's a month, you know, or maybe even if it's the next day, right? That's not an issue of deterrence because quality of life has already been reduced for the other people. Well, that's true the first time. But eventually, you know, why don't you go peeking in people's mailboxes to see if there's any presence in it? You know, it's because we've got decades of people just internalizing that it's a felony to peek inside people's mailboxes. And I leave stuff in my mailbox and people don't peek inside and I get it, you know, three days later. And I know a lot of people who do the same. And this is in the same culture where Amazon packages get stolen off the front porch with fair regularity. But we have a population that is conditioned to not get inside your mailbox. So it is a way to effect change and a way to do enforcement without abusing our resources for public safety. So the other part of your response that I have a question about is the idea that this isn't a good use of officer's time. And this stands in really interesting contrast to the responses that we got during the at-large city council debate and also the mayoral debate where there seem to be a fairly high level of enthusiasm for directing patrol and enforcement, you know, direct enforcement resources towards this problem. People who are mad about being inconvenienced by noise are always going to jump to the solution that is obvious, you know. And we have a cultural pattern of saying, yeah, well, if you commit a public infraction regarding road behavior, then you're supposed to get pulled over by a cop and get a ticket. That's the way it works. And if you are setting off illegal fireworks, then your neighbor is supposed to be able to report you and a police person is supposed to come to that address and give people a ticket. And the problem is that they're not considering the whole picture. So they think it should be easy. All you have to do is add more police or put more police on duty that one night or, you know, whatever the immediate solution, the obvious solution appears to be. But the fact is that it doesn't pencil out. And the fact is that it's nearly impossible if you're not sitting in an unmarked car on the block where they're setting off the fireworks, it's almost impossible to catch someone in the act, which is the only way you can ticket somebody for fireworks. So we need to look outside the box at other solutions. That's all there is to it. So let's move on to another question. You had... Because that's a really fiddly, annoying question. So you'd mentioned multifamily housing earlier. Yes. Do you believe that Longmont should allow multifamily housing in every neighborhood in the city? I would like to get there. Cities have done it. Minneapolis did it. And there wasn't an insurrection, at least not about multifamily housing. So, yeah, Longmont is surrounded by open space. That is statutorily protected. And it's overwhelmingly supported by the public to the extent that if we get two inches over the line or use the open space for something that is not absolutely nature areas or agriculture, the public comes and talks to the city council about it and says, you're misusing that land, pay the... I've actually never heard about this. Can you tell me about an instance of that happening? I'm just curious. Yeah, one instance is access roads for oil and gas. We had a statutory obligation to provide the road. It happened to go through open space and it caused a fuss. And, you know, it was settled. I mean, a statutory obligation is a statutory obligation and a taking is a taking. Which would be what it would be if we just refused and shut down any access at all to a mineral right, because this is Colorado and we haven't got our priorities straight yet on that subject. But the point is, I think, that we need to learn to live within our boundaries but still have a viable economy. So, for example, I recently became a homeowner. I live in Old Town. There is a big open field right near where I live that was going to be the... It was going to be the Bone Farm Co-working Organization. It was. And there could plausibly be, I don't know, 20 houses, 60 houses. You know, it's about six acres worth of land or, you know, 300 condos. And a lot of people in my neighborhood talk about how they sort of wish, you know, it's sort of nice to just have a big open field in the area. And they sort of, you know, it's nice because the dogs get to go there and it's a nice big open space. And they sort of wish that the city would just not let anyone develop it. Why can't we do that? Well, it's private land. But the city could just deny a permit for construction. Well, up to a point, yes. But we have zoning ordinances to actually... Zoning ordinances were two ways. You know, one is they protect the city from unpleasant uses, right? There's no place in Longmont where you can build a tannery, right? Which would make, you know... You're talking about a leather tannery. A leather tannery, right? Which would make what the turkey plant used to smell like, seem like nothing at all, right? A tannery stinks. And so we have zoning and you can't build a tannery in Longmont. But instead, you know, we have density ordinances. We have, you know, mixed use versus residential ordinances. And that also, it protects the neighborhood, but it also protects the landowner. It's protecting the landowner from exactly what you suggested, which is refusing to permit anything so that the land is essentially open space. But that's what I mean when we're talking about a taking, because, you know, our system of ownership and, yeah, capitalism or at least commerce wouldn't work if people didn't have some assurance that investments they made in property would have a return. So it's, you know, it's a cooperation. I told a lot of people and annoyed most of them when they were objecting about the bone farm development that, you know, they said what everyone always says when there's a new development next door to them, which is it's going to make a lot more traffic. And I don't want a lot more traffic. I want my neighborhood to stay just the way it is right now. And I would say, well, you know, you really should be rooting for that development because it's not very dense. And it is, you know, has some commercial aspects that are organic farming, you know, and you can go to the farmer's market that they're going to run and you can walk to it and it's kind of going to be an asset to the neighborhood. But they said, well, it's denser than my neighborhood. You know, well, it kind of isn't because they've got a lot of open land around the housing, you know, but it could be, as you suggested, a bunch of five-story multifamily units that would in fact increase density a lot. And instead, it was going to be a co-working development that only increased density a little bit. So you mentioned earlier, you know, the value of property as an investment. So that is another aspect of living in Oldtown, which is that there are a lot of homes which are owned by investors or people who live out of town. They're sort of just holding onto the house and renting it out as a way to get a return on investment. What about the prospect of building multifamily housing in Oldtown? Wouldn't that be a good idea to help make housing more affordable in the whole city by reducing the cost and what is generally considered the most desirable part of town? Well, there's a lot of controversy about that. I think almost everyone believes that the unique and now really essentially unbuildable architectures that exist in Oldtown should be protected that the flavor of those neighborhoods should be protected. On the other hand, they do take up a lot of land and a lot of them are on big lots. Some of the owners want to build accessory dwelling units in the backyard or build carriage houses, lots of different models for increasing the density without really changing the primary dwelling. And that's where the controversy lies because some people want no changes at all. And because parking is not plentiful in those neighborhoods because they're older than the proliferation of automobiles, a lot of people don't want that to happen. And so there's a fight about it because we need more density and in some ways I think Oldtown shouldn't be exempt from providing increased density and a lot of the people who already own homes there need the extra income or the extra space they could get from an auxiliary dwelling unit just to be able to stay there. So there's a real dialectic in terms of individual property rights versus the character of the neighborhood versus what urban engineering can do to make a gradual increase of density tolerable, getting people out of their cars, making the neighborhoods more walkable, providing usable public transit corridors, all of those would help us reclaim space in Oldtown that could be used for increased density without destroying the character of the neighborhood. Now I don't like the phrase character of the neighborhood because a lot of times it's a code, it's a dog whistle for opposing change. And we have missed the window for opposing change. We have a critical problem, we have two critical problems, that climate change and the housing shortage and we will be negligent if we don't address those problems. Well as someone who lives in Oldtown I might say, but what about a lot of these new developments on the north side of town that are after the development of the automobile and these houses have gigantic lots that they're not particularly well utilized and these people have two or three car garages and these huge driveways, why don't we densify those neighborhoods? And we should and they have far less claim to protection if any than Oldtown because Oldtown is really something unique but all of the developments that we built during the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and the early part of the 2010s are just subdivisions. There's nothing unique about them other than you live in it and it's home to you but your quality of life is not gonna be changed if there is a five plex on the corner or a row of town homes in the next block and there are people in the older neighborhoods so for example, Southmore Park has houses that were built in the 60s that neighborhoods gonna have to have its electric infrastructure and its sewer infrastructure updated just to remain livable and just to accommodate electrification and when those things happen we could make it possible for people to build auxiliary dwelling units in their huge backyards and it could keep people in their houses. A lot of the families who live there culturally like to live in multi-generational groupings and the houses which probably have one and a half baths maybe if they're lucky, it would help their lifestyle a lot if they could have an auxiliary dwelling unit maybe that was subsidized by the city it increases density and it reinforces their cultural preferred lifestyle so that kind of thing, if the city makes helps by making the infrastructure supported then everybody wins, it's not something to fight it's something that can improve people's life. Let's move on to the next question should Longmont's next light service be made available to residents at cost? At cost is... Let me define cost for you. Okay, because there are lots of ways to define costs and one of them involves retiring the debt. So when I say allowing Longmont to next light to be made available at cost that includes certainly paying down any bond debt that was made to build the facilities in the first place ongoing maintenance, the cost of labor, the ongoing cost of the service the cost that would be required to operate next light in perpetuity for the benefits of the residents of the city and to keep it being a market leading or a country leading internet service provider but for the city of Longmont and maybe some adjacent communities if they'd be interested in that. The answer to that is yes and essentially it is because it's a Colorado enterprise. It has to be self-sustaining which means it has to be able to retire its debt, et cetera, et cetera. And what we need to understand is that the cost of maintaining social equity also needs to count, all right? Because there are some people in Longmont who are getting their service below cost and in order to have a stable society and nurturing society to support the education of our young people, we have to do that. You know, there are plenty of families in Longmont who wouldn't have internet access at all if they couldn't get next light below cost. You're referring to people who are taking advantage of the city's 1495 per month program? Or are you referring to who's getting next light below cost? Well, those people are some. The St. Spring Valley School District. The city is in the process of with new grant money and ARPA money in fact, building out Wi-Fi hotspots in the city that anybody can use and that's part of the cost of next light too. So essentially what we need to do is make sure that everybody has ubiquitous access. For that matter, there are a whole bunch of people that took part as I did in bootstrapping the service, bought it when it was first available without any knowledge of whether it was gonna work well or not, you know? We have faith, right? And so it's $50 a month for me for the rest of my life. At some point that's gonna be below cost for me. And then finally, it's gonna need to be upgraded. Because of the vision of the people who put the infrastructure in, we only have to upgrade access points to convert our one gigabit ethernet to 10 gigabit ethernet and that's gonna happen sooner than ever I thought it would. But your definition of that cost is kind of fungible there, you know? But the fact is that nobody's getting fat from next light. Next light has way better customer service than any competing service. If you call next light and you say, my internet's slow and I don't understand, not only will they talk you through resetting your modem if you don't know how to do that, they will talk you through running a speed test if you don't know how to do that. And if nothing works and it really truly isn't riding the way it should, that brings the sense of somebody out. You try to get Comcast to do that, you know? It didn't happen. So let me ask you another question related to this. So I also get access to the charter member rate. So my personal residence, I get one gigabit ethernet, one gigabit fiber service for $50 a month, which is great. And it is a wonderful service that I love using. I also used to own a small business and for $50 a month at my business, I believe I got 30 megabits down and about one megabit up. In order to get the same rate, the same speeds that I get at home, I would have had to pay $600 per month. Yes. Why is that? I have no idea. But what I do know is that the economic development partnership opposes that, that the rates need to be aligned better. There were a bunch of unknowns when those original rates were set. We didn't know how many commercial adopters there would be. We didn't know how important it was going to be to business development. And we didn't know what the bandwidth pattern and what the usage patterns were going to be. So now that we do know those things and we are planning a speed upgrade, then those rates will be regularized to be commercially competitive because just long months, low electrical rates and the reliability of our fiber ethernet service is already a huge draw in terms of recruiting new businesses to come to Longmont. And that's a delicate negotiation because we don't want to overbuild with new primary employers and strain at the seas. So what we want is new businesses that will pay high wages, bring a small number of people in with them and employ people who already work here but have the effect of raising people's wages, making the live work problem simpler. Can city council direct next light to lower their commercial rates? We can't direct them to violate the terms of the bond agreement. Okay. But we can direct the mobile right now. We don't need to because the director of next light services is right on board with both business development and social equity. And so she's doing what we're asking people to do anyway. Okay. Many residents in the community struggle to afford the rising costs of childcare. Should the city address childcare affordability? The city already is addressing childcare affordability which is one of the things that really upsets me with our current crop of candidates is that they don't know that. So the thing that needs to be done first of all, Governor Polis is on board with the idea of improving childcare and early childhood education in the whole state. And so there is money to subsidize these activities. Council member Waters about a year and a half ago, slightly pre-pandemic, founded and grew an early childhood education consortium of many stakeholders throughout not just Longmont but Boulder County. And they are envisioning different models for making childcare work better and early childhood education work better. We have private subsidized and friends and family childcare in Longmont and the level of quality and cost of all of those things could be regularized by forming a network of support services that would make sure that the caregivers knew what they needed to know had support for improving the quality of their service had back up. You know, like the network of substitute teachers that the public school system has. So if one daycare center was shorthanded or one home caregiver got sick, you would have a network that would help you make sure that the children affected stayed covered and the parents affected got to keep working. You know, the pandemic broke childcare and that consortium, because they were talking about the impacts, many of the participants of course were actually daycare, childcare and child education caregivers and they said, we can't get PPE. We don't know how to get substitute teachers. We have to close down if somebody gets sick and what happened with that was that Dr. Waters went to the city and says we have a supply chain for getting these un-gettable supplies and we can get them at very low cost. Can we use emergency funding to provide them to daycare and it turned out that the answer was yes. Can you explain to me why it's so important that the city was helping daycares as opposed to any other institution? What's so important about daycare for the city? Helping daycare helps every other institution that uses frontline workers because if the frontline workers aren't there, it's like Domino's. You know, if you can't run your grocery store, if you can't run a delivery restaurant, then it affects all kinds of people. It affects elders that are locked down at home. You know, and I know people, immune-compromised older people that are still locked down after all this time, even though they're vaccinated, you know, they're immune-compromised and they don't feel safe living their pre-pandemic normal lives yet. So it's a cascade. If childcare is broken, then just like Domino's, a whole lot of city institutions fall. Nurses have their kids in daycare, right? Orderlies have their kids in daycare. Doctors have their kids in daycare. Everybody needs it. And now, well, a lot of people it's not talked about in terms of why people can't hire, why businesses that are reopening can't hire. But the fact is a big piece of it is that parents are afraid to go back to work because they're not sure that childcare is reliable. So somebody's still staying home. And how many people does that take out of the workforce? So I remember hearing a conversation, I think this might have been during a city council meeting where Harold Dominguez, the city manager, was discussing the process of how the city government was sort of gonna get up and running again. And I believe that this was during that brief window where we thought the pandemic was ending and people stopped wearing masks everywhere during the summer. And I remember Harold mentioning that part of the challenge that the city was facing was staffing all of the shifts because the city is a 24-7 operation. It's not just about the people who work at NextLight or the people who work in the city manager's office or the city attorney's office. It's the people who staff parks and recreation, the people who staff all of the city services that have to operate 24 hours a day. And Harold mentioned that part of the problem was, not all of these people live in the city. And he wasn't sure when schools were going to reopen and when people would be able to come into the office on a consistent basis. Is that fundamentally an issue of childcare for them? That is largely an issue of childcare for them. It's also a, comes back to the whole live work idea. People who work for the city of Longmont, some of them prefer to live in Frederick or to live in Lafayette or whatever. But a lot of them would like to live here because they get a big chunk of their lives back if they do, but they can't afford it. If you work for the engineering department and you're a water engineer or a sewage engineer or a meter reader, you can't afford to buy a house in Longmont. But we would like that to be true. So is there some way that we can make it more affordable for city employees to live in the community that they serve? Are you suggesting that we subsidize those employees? I don't know. Is that something the city would be interested in? Like, do you think that that's a good solution to that problem? I hadn't considered it before. And on the one hand, the city's never been in the real estate business. Longmont struggles to keep its workforce paid essentially at parity with workers with the same job description in other cities throughout the state. We're aiming for 102% of the, or 2% above the average. And we're not quite there. We're between 100% and 101%. So everybody is, we're trying to raise people's wages. We couldn't increase the parity this year, get to the 102% because we have a lot of inflation. And so the average wage is going up. And that means that Longmont just had to struggle to keep, to stand still. But that might be one way, if the benefits package were increased, it might work. It also could be, because I don't know all the nuances of municipal regulation, it might be impossible. So it's a good idea. I would be interested in looking into it. It might be more possible because now the Longmont Housing Authority and the city of Longmont are closer together under common administration. On the other hand, it would be a perk that a lot of people couldn't avail themselves of because it reduces their choice of dwelling. It would be much better if people could choose where they wanted to live and choose their lifestyle and not have to give up income. So the last question that I wanna ask you is a question of ethics. During the other debates, we asked this as a yes or no question, but I don't think we're constrained by that format here. Seven minutes. Yeah, so I'd like to get a little bit more of your take on this question. So do you trust that this election will be fairly tabulated and the results fairly adjudicated by the Boulder County clerk? Absolutely, and I have a lot of good reasons why. Before I joined the municipal government, I had about a two year period of retirement where I was ramping down family obligations and looking for the next thing that I was going to do because I was so done with the private sector. And one of the things that I did was serve as an election judge in Boulder County elections for two primaries and one general election, the 2016 general election, which was pretty exciting. And when they train election judges, they explain all of the processes and all of the security and I was already pretty much a data scientist and pretty much a process maven before taking that training. And I will tell you that there are no loopholes in Boulder County's system, none. I would stake my life on it. They just did a brilliant job of securing the election, making it unhackable, making the documents unfakable. And without the only way that you can subvert our election system is to have an insider subvert it and you'd have to have plants to subvert it because one of the things that in the process is that you can't do anything with secure documents without a person, two people, one from each party and one from differing parties because you could have a green and a Republican or a Libertarian and a Democrat. But usually it's a Republican and a Democrat because major party, but there's nobody who shares the same interest in hacking the documents that's ever allowed to handle them. So yes, you'd have to have a clerk after the fact like happened down in the Southwest corner where there's somebody who was actively trying to... I believe it was Mesa County. Mesa County, there you go. Took me a minute to summon it too. I couldn't remember that. Yeah, well, and I was talking so I had no summoning bandwidth yet but that's what it would take. It would take somebody who deliberately and maliciously wanted to subvert the process and they got caught, didn't they? So there are some people who believe that there are county clerks out there who are trying to tip the results of the election in some way that they might personally favor. As you said, you spent most of your career in the private sector. You volunteered, I guess, for these elections and then shortly after that got elected to city council. In your experience, can you speak to the level of ethics that you've seen in civic employees either at the county level or at the city level? Can you imagine some of those people attempting to deliberately subvert an election? No, you... Why not? I mean, wouldn't it be in their personal interest to do so? I hope not. I hope that they are all better at connecting the dots than that because if that became successful, we would lose democracy and lose our civilization and if they understood the reality of it, nobody would want that. Okay. Well, we are just about out of time. Are there any closing thoughts that you'd like to leave the audience with? Yeah, and it's a good segue from what we were talking about. You know, what we need to do is get back to Walter Cronkite style, evidence-based thinking. We need to know what the truth is, be willing to accept alternatives, be willing to listen to each other's arguments and not be stuck in anybody's ideological rut. And right now we're in a situation where almost everybody seems to be stuck in an ideological rut, but it's no fun. You know, you're down there in the rut. Let's talk to each other and find a consensus that we can all understand to make this a better place to live. Thank you very much, Marcia. I'd like to thank the audience and anyone who's watching. This is the end of our 2021 debate series for the 2021 city council election for the city of Longmont. If you'd like to see more content like this, you can go to the Longmont Public Media YouTube page where we have candidate interviews with all of the candidates, including videos where they get to introduce themselves. We have a debate with the 2021 at-large candidates where all six candidates were present on stage at the same time, and a male old debate. Shaquille, I hate to interrupt, but you forgot to give me a chance to say thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for listening to this wonky discussion. I really enjoyed it and I hope you did. Bear, go ahead and you can finish up now. Thank you very much, everyone, for watching. Marcia, can you provide a little bit of information if anyone would wanna hear from you more or ask you any follow-up questions? Marsha42.com, and my Facebook page is Marsha42 as well. Like it, leave me a question, and I answer every city council call and every email, so I'm accessible. All right, thank you very much, everyone. Good night. Good night.