 Welcome to the last episode of the first phase of the Longmont Voices and Vision Project. My name is Tim Waters and as a volunteer for Longmont Public Media, the City of Longmont's Public Access Television Service Provider, I've spent much of the months of March and April during the COVID-19 pandemic interviewing Longmonters, asking them three questions. One, how are they getting through this pandemic, this incredible period of time where we've been socially distanced and physically separated? Two, how are they staying connected with friends and family when we can't be in physical proximity to one another? And three, what are their aspirations for the post-pandemic world? Assuming there's going to be a new normal, what would they like it to be? Of the 70 plus Longmonters I've had a chance to interview, I've been inspired the more I've listened to their answers to those questions. And to wrap up this phase of the project, I've invited a dozen or so of those residents back into one final panel discussion to go back to the third question I asked. What are their aspirations for the post-pandemic world? What's the preferred future they'd like to see and help create? I invite you to join me to listen to them. The conversation that follows is thoughtful, rigorous, and hopeful. Thanks to every single individual who I had the privilege of interviewing and for the members of this panel for the conversation that follows. Scott Cook, you're going to be up first. Scott Cook is the Executive Director of our Longmont Chamber of Commerce. Scott, thanks for your service to the community. And if you want to add to that introduction, do so. But I've asked you to start with responding to that first question I've asked this morning. Sure. Well, thank you, Tim, very much for this time. And again, for coordinating this group, I'm going to enjoy, I think, personally watching the videos and learning from everyone and learning from everyone today. And yes, you're correct. I'm the Director at the Longmont Chamber of Commerce and glad to be here. It's such an interesting question that you put forward of a preferred future because it is correct, I think, in thinking that we can shape it. And the other thing I think we need to keep in mind is as we've gone through this process, we know a little bit about what that future is going to be. There's some things that are developing already. There are shining some light on what the future will look like. So I'll answer that question in light of that. And what I mean by the things that are developing already, I think that there's a heightened sense of globalism right now. And that's because we're going through this experience as a planet, as a globe. Every single person on this planet today is experiencing this along with each of us. Each of us right now in this conversation have somewhat something in common with every single last person on this planet today. And this is unlike any experience that we've probably ever had as humanity. There's been world wars. There's been other pandemics. But I don't think that we've, well, we've never had the technology that we have today. And so we're not experiencing, so we are experiencing something different today than what we've experienced in the past. At that same time, I think we're having a heightened sense of localism. And we've all, I think, are beginning to realize even more, I think probably many of us in this conversation today understand the importance of small business and our local institutions, our local government, things like that. We get that. But I think even more, it's becoming even more apparent to us and to everybody else in the community. I think it was last year, Jessica, Jessica, you can correct me. If I'm wrong, you had author Bruce Katz come speak to our community about regionalism and localism. And I think it would be very interesting to hear what he has now, because I expect he would be doubling down on what he said, and he would have even more information as to why his theories were correct. But for the preferred future, I would say one thing that I would really like to see is a renewed interest in small business. And all business is very important. And we need all sizes of business to make this economy work and to return us back to more prosperous times. But I think we have to remember that much creation and much innovation in this country has come out of small businesses. So I hope that we don't lose that desire to have those and to support those. In this country, we value small business. We value the risk taker, we value the entrepreneur. And even if we never become a small business owner ourselves, we take even some pride in ourselves of supporting that small business, or we even hope have maybe a small sense of ownership when we go downtown Main Street and support a small business, or buy from a small manufacturer, things like that. We love that rags to riches story in this country. We love that story of a new immigrant coming to our country and making it. That's part of our own story, all of our stories. And so I hope that we have a renewed interest, a renewed desire to support our local businesses after this is over. I think that's coming about. They've been hurt very badly, many of them during this crisis. And I hope that we will continue to support them and that we'll even, again, as I said, have a renewed interest in that. I also think that media is an important thing for the future. In the past, we've been, many people have spoken about the divisions of our country on different sides. And we've lost, I think, the ability, maybe not the ability, but at least the desire to want to come together, to discuss and to debate. We've lost a lot of ability, I think, to debate in this country. And so I hope that as we come out of this crisis that we will be listening to each other, that we'll be listening to all different sides. Because I think that's what it's going to take for us to get out of the situation is all ideas, there's going to be a lot of solutions coming from a lot of different people from a lot of different places. And we're going to need them all. We're going to need those global ideas. We're going to need those local ideas to work together to bring us out of this situation. Got it. Thanks. Good start. Scott Converse, founder of the Tinker Mill, of the Longmont Observer, of Longmont Public Media, and a whole resume of other entrepreneurial work. Let's hear from you. Okay. Well, I, you know, it's interesting because it's very easy to fall into kind of a dystopian view and get angry and negative. And I think a lot of people have let that overtake them. And from time to time I've let that happen to me during this process. And I think that that's a really good way to defeat what good could come out of this. So I think it's better, much better, to not fall into that. And to really look at how this has made everyone realize that we're all connected, that every one of us is affected by whatever, what everyone else does. This is not, we are not a nation of individuals. We are a nation of Americans that what we do affects what happens to all of the other Americans. It's all connected. So I think that what will come out of this, I hope, is that we'll understand that 30 million people losing their jobs connected to health insurance in a pandemic isn't such a good idea. So things like that should be addressed from a national perspective. How do we address that? You know, that's the kind of stuff I'm hoping that we'll start to realize. And that applies to things like education. It applies to schools, to early education. There's a whole bunch of things. How do we deal with our homeless where you could have pockets of this virus kind of existing and then flaring up again if we just ignore them? So you've got to kind of address the whole thing, otherwise it never goes away. It's got to be something that we address across the nation. So I think that Scott actually hit on some really good things too. Particularly the media part of it, for obvious reasons, that's an area I spend a fair amount of time in. And I think that having a media that is able to actively get into the activities of government, the activities of businesses, transparency, basically. I think that it's essential that we have more and more transparency, particularly in government. And particularly at the federal level, there was a guy named Marshall McLuhan who had ideas back in the 60s about global local, globalism and being local, which also reflects a little on what Scott said. I think that globally we're much more aware of what's happening here. But locally is where the real action happens. I think guys like you, guys like our city manager Harold here, all of our nonprofits, our LDDAs and LEDs and the chamber and all of the things that happen at a local level, that's really where the change starts. More than anything else. And that's what this group represents. And I think that it's really important that this group engage directly with how we make these types of changes. And we work together to do it. We don't work independently. And that is a tendency. We do have a tendency sometimes to do our own thing. And it just doesn't make sense to do your own thing and replicate what everyone else is doing. It's much better to work together. We're starting to see more and more of that. And I would love to see more of that happen here. And I think that that forces up because obviously it's not going to come from the top down, not today. So let's see what we can do that way. Let's see what we can change from the bottom up because we have the people, we have the capabilities. Let's do it now. I suspect we're going to hear more of that sentiment as we listen to more of these responses because I've had a chance to hear you respond to that question before. But next is Shaquille DeLau. Shaquille, young, Shaquille, this is not fair to you to represent a whole generation. But you're representing a whole generation. A young entrepreneur, relatively new to Longmont, but seriously involved in the community, one of the co-founders or a board member of Longmont Public Media, a gifted writer and a young business entrepreneur. Shaquille, what say you? So when I think about what the current situation demands of us, and I'm going to be speaking about sort of economics and people because what we're experiencing right now is primarily a crisis of healthcare, but I don't have anything intelligent to say about that. But when you speak about people and their relationship to the economy, I think one of the most important lessons that I've been hearing from a lot of business thought leaders, and I hate that phrase, by the way, is that you can protect people, but you can't protect jobs. So as I think about how Longmont should grow and respond to the current crisis, what I've been trying to think about is what can we do to protect the people of Longmont and in protecting those people, create an environment where the jobs for those people will also be there. We can't know what the future for Longmont will hold and we can't really know what the basis for Longmont's economic future will be. I think part of what we've learned over the past two or three months or so is that it's really difficult to predict where the economic consequences of the current crisis will be and what parts of the economy they will wind up disrupting. So what I would like to see is I'd like to see Longmont make the sorts of structural reforms necessary to be able to support the people who live here no matter what that future entails. And what that really means is that means making sure that the people who live here right now will always be able to afford to live here and that'll be true whether or not the population grows or shrinks. I think to accomplish that, Longmont needs structural reform around the way that around housing, around businesses, and around transit. And if we can fix those three things I think that creates a stronger base for Longmont no matter where the future goes. I think it needs to be possible for anyone of reasonable economic means to be able to live in any neighborhood in this town that they want. I think we need to think a little bit more like a city and less like a suburb where we have little walled garden neighborhoods and we need to think more about the ways that our community is connected to each other not just through our social relationships but literally how you get from one place to another. I think to address issues of traffic and affordability you need a robust system of intra-city transit of all types that includes cars yes but also buses and bicycles and skate boards and everything else. So the people who work here and live here don't have to get into a car for their day-to-day travel and owning a car can be a major barrier to affordability. I also think we need to cultivate the kind of business culture that meets the needs of our community and distribute that business culture throughout the whole community. And what I mean by that is really that I'd like to see little shops and bodegas in every neighborhood in town so that you know if you have basic needs whether it's for an onion or to grab a drink with your neighbors or for childcare you have a place local to you that you can feel ownership of that becomes part of your community and helps bind you to get more tightly to the people that you live around. Thank you. Thanks we're going to come back to questions of structure and what that means before we're finished I'm certain and a lot of that's going to have implications for the city and Harold Dominguez our city manager is in the call on the program. Harold most of folks will know you've been our city manager since 2012. This is the second major crisis emergency that we declared that you've led the city through. You have to feel like the weight not only of the city but probably more than the city is on your shoulders. So thanks for carbon at time this morning. I wanted you to pick it up from there. Thanks you know when you you know listening to the folks but that is spoken already it's interesting because even I'm seeing themes. I think one of the the biggest things that I've thought about recently in a few years ago I was someone gave me I think it's Mike Butler gave me the book by Peter Block community the structure of belonging and it's a really interesting book to read and when you look at this is a third city I've worked in and you know Longmont does and has done so much better at really creating a community involvement structure and trying to engage any number of members of our community and everything we do but I don't think that's what I've necessarily seen in all communities that I've had the opportunity to visit and talk to their city managers and and look at their challenges and I think for me the thing is is how do you build upon that and how do you build upon that that structure belonging because one of the things that this situation has done and I think this is applicable to frankly all levels of government. As Scott stated you know this is something we're all going through together at the same time as a community as a county as a state as a nation and frankly as an international community and when you have those opportunities you know I fundamentally believe you can focus on two things you can focus on the negative aspects of it or you can focus on what can we gain out of this in order to potential positive aspects of this and and this has forced us as a government as individuals to begin very quickly adapting to the technologies that have been available but use them in ways that we never imagined within our structures and what it's doing is really allowing us to connect to many people whether it's family members whether it's groups that we never would have had the opportunity to interact with we now have that ability to do it and where I'm starting to really think about the utility of this is so many people that live in our community are caught up in their daily lives of going to work interacting with their kids some many people work multiple jobs and they're trying to interact with their family and it's hard for those individuals to engage in anything we're talking about because you just don't have time and we now have the ability to utilize this to engage a wider segment of our community and I think that's important because when you look at the structure of belonging and what that means I think today uniformly we've become so fragmented in terms of this is my opinion or this is my this is how I view the world that we lose sight on that we're all trying to do the best that we can for ourselves for the jobs that we hold for our community and really trying to figure out how do we truly create a community of belonging where everyone feels like they belong to something and we all focus on what we want to do to make our community better I've had the opportunity to talk to any number of people any number of groups regarding questions regarding you know the the response or end with COVID-19 and the interesting thing is everybody wants to make Long Island a better community no one has said anything other than that and too often then we get caught up in disagreements of the how and how do we make it a better community versus let's all agree on we want Long Island we want Boulder County we want the state of Colorado to be better and let's focus on that and figure out how we can use everything that we've learned in a short period of time to really create a belonging where we come together as a community to not only get ourselves through the situation we're in but really establish the future that we want as a community and I think we have the opportunity to do that now and for me at least in terms of how I look at my world and what I'm even doing within the organization is taking this opportunity to engage as many people as we possibly can to the common vision of how do you make the community great and how do you do that and establish it through a culture of belonging where we all focus on hope and we all focus on a better future for our community Harold I can hear him clapping in the background well if we think about the future of the community Jessica Erickson brought a new one into the world just on the front end of Jessica as a new mom and as the executive director of the Long Want Economic Development Partnership which will play a key role as will others in this on this program in in the revitalizing or re-invigorating our our economy what are your perspectives Jessica both as a as a new mom and as a one of our one of our most high profile executives in town thank you Tim and thank you again for including me this is a great group I respect everyone on this call and very much in skill honored and privileged to be a part of this conversation with these individuals and in particular as you said we had a baby on March 12th so in the very early days of the pandemic our little Adeline Grace joined us and joined the world and I have to say from the minute that she was born completely reframed my worldview and since then has definitely impacted how I view my role as well as as you always say my worst fears and my greatest hopes for for recovery in our future coming out of this as a community as individuals as a nation and as a world I think one of the things that I've recognized in recent days and weeks and even since I last spoke to you is that many of the challenges that we face as that we're seeing as a result of the pandemic we're not created by the pandemic but have been accelerated by the pandemic I think that we were at a tipping point before this happened and this has accelerated us going over the edge on some of the challenges that we face as far as the economy people have mentioned homelessness and health care and housing we were at a tipping point before this hit and I think that this just accelerated those challenges and so what I really hope to see and as many of you know we spent as long as we key the last year and a half or so developing and then adopting and now implementing the Advancement 2.0 strategy around a collective impact model I think our ability to solve these challenges and the opportunity that we have now to really look at how we solve these challenges collectively as well as take advantage of future opportunities collectively is going to be critical to the future of our community and how we come out of this event and how we recover and show our resilience as a community now ultimately for me the future that I would like to see is a future where my daughter has the same opportunities for prosperity that I've had in my life and that we reverse the trend that we've seen in particular with the millennial generation where future generations are worse off than their parents generations I want to be a part of ensuring collectively that my daughter's future is even greater than mine and I just want to Shaquille mentioned this idea of restructuring how we approach things not just simply around jobs and I think a lot of times people think of economic development as being about jobs and historically that has been true but we've really taken an approach to economic development in this community that I think is going to serve us well not just through the collective impact model but in looking at not the end result of jobs as being what economic development is about but focusing on things like place and talent and connectivity all the things that Shaquille mentioned with the end result of everyone within this community being able to live in this community comfortably successfully and and with prosperity into the future. Jessica thanks. Eric Cosimpa executive director of the Longmont Community Foundation if there was ever a time when both the foundation and those who contribute and do the work of foundation was needed in the community I can't imagine maybe since the flood right I mean the the role that you play but I know how big it is right now and I know how much you are having a chance to listen both to needs and ways to respond so pick it up from there from the nonprofit perspective what's that future you'd like to see us move forward. Yeah Tim I really appreciate the honor to be involved in this panel too as well and I want to echo everything that everybody's said as far as thanking you and your efforts and first of all you know I can't enter anything without telling a joke so for me my future is wrapped around people embracing my hairstyle in the future so I really hope that's that's a future we can all see but you know I'm guessing I see lots of hair and so I don't think that's coming anytime soon so. I don't want to interrupt too much I just want to say amen. So regarding the future that I'd like to see I think some of the themes are kind of the same as others that have been shared so the feelings of empathy and sharing and caring for one another and I think that you know Longmont is such a great history in past and in friendliness and family and and I really like to see that continue and I think that through this crisis I think we really can explore some of those themes and and make sure that we continue to be a caring and kind community and I don't really see that changing while I think it's fine for differences I think you know the fact of the matter is we've always had differences in this country and across the world and I think in some ways you have to embrace some of those and learn how to deal with other differences or how to work with other differences and that's totally fine and I'm saying differences of opinion primarily so people have differences of opinion people have a future that they think is is totally different from somebody else's and that's that's totally fine that's exactly how we've gotten things done in our community in our world so and I think that that's fine and to you know to embrace that change I think is really positive and so I guess for me the future I'd like to see is is kind of embracing change for not only our community but also for the nonprofits I think you know when I first started in the nonprofit world about 30 years ago we used to have five or ten year strategic plans and I think that era is done and I think if you're not able and willing and adept enough to change kind of on a dime you're going to be left behind so people really need to embrace this idea of change and change quickly and change and pivot an overused word right now pivoting but just a way to look for the future and look at change in a real quick response is really needed I'd also like to say that applaud everybody is using technology and I would just want to further that along lines of the nonprofit sector especially I think we have been a little bit behind in the sector as far as embracing technology and part of that is just there's not a lot of measurable opportunity to make money and technology so if you're a tech company you're probably not going to go do a product or service for the nonprofits you're probably going to do a for-profit technology fix um and then kind of uh kind of facetiously I'd like to say that you know less meetings is the meeting really necessary you know I I really like us to really think about that and if the meeting is necessary can we can we provide some opportunity for engagement you know true engagement we often enter a meeting and we say hey how are you doing I'm fine how's the weather I don't really like us to start thinking about you know truly thinking and checking in with that person and seeing if they're really truly fine and you know if there is something you can do to help them and sometimes we get caught up in the kind of the in the now about like getting things done during those meetings but maybe we need to step back a little bit decide we're gonna have a little longer meeting in order to make sure that somebody's mentally okay and that we can understand where they're coming from and understand their issues and such and I really think that helps build then that community and that that cohesiveness that we're looking for the community that kind of belonging if you will that that Harold was talking about if we if we keep understanding each other and we keep kind of understanding where they're coming from I think that only helps us propel as a community and remain a friendly place thanks Eric Marta Loachman a mom a former teacher a consultant working with cultural brokers and that whole effort in town and an aspiring elected official as a candidate for for Balder County commissioner Marta way in hi yeah thanks for inviting me thanks for your work Tim and it's it's great to be in a conversation with all of you that we've done business with or worked with or we're sat in community conversations with especially right now while we're so physically isolated so it's great to participate a couple pieces I mean this question about our preferred future for me has you know a few different pieces based on all my previous work I mean one of those is really this challenge for all of us to look at this crisis with an opportunity to create an equitable world that for me is the intertwining underlying how do we do that because we've never lived in an equitable world and so previously people were I think worried about what that change was going to look at there's a little bit of fear and now we have a we're really going to have a blank slate when this is done and so I think that's one of the underlying pieces and what does that mean it means we have a few really specific pieces from how we're going to go forward and I heard some of it talked about a little bit already one of those for me is around financial literacy we came from over 10 years ago after the mortgage crisis we really didn't take the opportunity at that time to start talking about how to prepare for a crisis how to be prepared financially how to really nudge each other and and create more dialogue around just financial not necessarily saddiness but really how we protect ourselves and each other around resources and my part of my hope is that we take this to a new level after COVID because we have so many community members myself included who are self-employed so not being able to work for the the last eight weeks creates a whole another level of stress so financial literacy I hope that we do that differently in the future one of the other pieces someone already talked a little bit around housing because that's part of my career for the last 20 years my hope around housing specifically is that we create some policies that will create opportunities for first-time home buyers for people who want to live and work in our own communities that looks like initiatives like a first look initiative that we saw after the mortgage crisis the unfortunate reality that we will see foreclosures again not for the same reasons that we did um in 2008 but how do we as a community say we want people who who need to live and work our first responders our teachers etc how do we open up doors so that they can actually have access to the housing inventory that is out there um that's something that I want to see happen in our future um the other piece someone talked a little bit about the technology piece um and that's a big conversation because the reality is we've got kids in st. frane valley school district who never got connected when they went back to school um we had about 93 percent for me 93 of our kids were online for me the question was where are the other seven percent of our own community um how are they accessing something as basic as education I think we tend to forget that a lot of our organizations who put band-aids on to just keep moving along um and people were working from home there's organizations and there's community members here in in longmont and boulder county that didn't have all of the devices to work from home to get their kids on no families who've been doing work from their phones and quite frankly I don't want to do my 12 hour day on a phone and so why would we expect our kids to do the same thing why would we expect other employees to do the same thing so we've got these challenges and the underlying piece is we need to recognize and really take on the challenges of how do we ensure that everybody in our community is involved in these conversations because this is a fantastic opportunity to use something like technology to have this conversation and yet we still have members in our community who don't have the access and who really might have a smartphone but they are not using um the the information and or don't have the data plans for a myriad of reasons and so it's just a reminder about um yes we're all in the same circumstance yes we're all in the same situation and yet it looks very different for all of us and the other piece I want to make sure that um we don't forget in our future planning after doing flood recovery work for the state and working with the city of longmont after the 2013 flood one of the pieces that we I didn't hear when I sat down and talked with first responders and folks who are on the ground is this question about mental health because we have a significant amount of um mental health for people all over for our first responders our health co-workers who are under stress who are not with their families we have folks who are not being able to grieve properly um right now in what's happening for lots of jobs for lots of family members and so how do we do that differently in the future because um although a zoom meeting is helpful um right now we're missing a piece of that and I just feel like that community connection that people talked about already there's different layers of that but I hope in our future that we take that um to a new level and and look at how our employment you know how our employee conversations people someone talked about that already generative discussions but how do we really care for people in a different way and show that connectedness because longmont to me um has some amazing programs it's done some great work but I want to make sure that all of those different pieces are somehow included in where we go in the future Tim so thanks for bringing us together to start with some ideas we're going to start someplace and um this conversation is a good a good springboard uh there's several references to policy uh that several of you have made my introduction to dick lions was as one of the state's leading legal experts on education policy alliance gattus law firm people know dick as a leader he served on numerous boards and commissions in longmont seems like forever uh and and brings both legal expertise and understanding of policy and politics to this conversation uh dick pick it up from there uh thanks uh uh i appreciate it tim uh yeah my my my i've been an attorney for 43 years and 41 of those years have been devoted to the representation of of governing boards commissions agencies uh on the local government level uh we've served as special counsel as counties municipalities but mostly um school districts fire districts water districts park and rec districts uh any local government throughout the state to the tune of about 45 of them and and so i've had a unique perspective uh that's a little bit different from all of you uh in watching this pandemic unfold and how it's been responded to by our leaders and so i think i have two preferred outcomes from this and number one is a a better understanding and a clarification of the roles and responsibilities of each level of government i think we've seen a breakdown between the federal and the state and the state and the county and the county and the municipalities the municipalities and and all of the um districts so to speak throughout the throughout the state um we've seen our president kind of adopt a schizophrenic attitude saying yes he's in charge well no he's not responsible it's up the states and this back and forth uh we really need to come out of this with a understanding of who who's responsible for what up and down the line and i think we've seen that even in in the state i think that the governor polis has finally um grasped the issues and the legalities i think at first he wasn't sure of his role versus uh the state health department and i think the boulder county commissioners weren't sure are they in charge or is the boulder county health department in charge um and i i even kind of picked that up with the city is are you kind of waiting for which agency which level of government to act before we know what to do uh so i think the preferred outcome number one uh is uh to have that uh defined clearly you know there one thing i've learned in representing all these boards and commissions for all these years um is that power abhors a vacuum and someone's got to step in and um i i think we've got a little bit of the vacuum going on right now now who's going to step in and lead is it going to be the states is it going to be the federal government and who individually is going to do that uh so it's going to come someone's going to fill that void uh and uh we really need to support that um someone's got to take over you know what when they say um for change to happen someone has to decide something and start acting on it and uh so that's that's what i'm looking for is a preferred outcome a little bit different twist than all of you the second thing that uh i'd like to see is a preferred outcome is a better understanding of our population of the term public health safety and welfare you know i've written up team resolutions and and and ordinances and and regulations and we always throw that we always throw that term uh in the beginning in the preamble in the whereas clause or as a justification for some action what does it really mean and i think we've got a lot of confusion on that today uh you know we see people who say well my right to have a a beer in the bar with my buddies outweighs the city's right to tell me to wear a mask really uh what is the definition of public health welfare and safety which what are those priorities and i'd like to see us come out of this with a better understanding of that uh vis-a-vis the what i call the the quasi populist movement uh of waving the flag and saying their individual rights outweigh public health safety and welfare so i think i think we need a better understanding and a better consensus of what that well-used phrase really really means uh in the future so those are my two preferred outcomes thanks dick marcia martin uh highly regarded engineer uh the owner of a number of patents in her professional life more recently elected to city council so marcia you can wear your city council hat or your activist hat or your engineering hat because you have several you could wear but but thanks for being part of the panel and and uh pick it up from there with your preferred future thank you tim i'm really honored to be in the company of so much leadership and um mostly i think what i need to do is is uh frame maybe a wider context for all of us leaders so the first thing i want to do um which i think no one has done yet is acknowledge all the victims of this crisis um including the dead as well as the living victims who are going to have their lives so completely disrupted um i think we should soberly consider the duty that that puts on us um to honor what they've lost and build a better world for the survivors as we come forward so this is an opportunity but it's an opportunity in the sense that the comet that struck the earth 60 000 years ago was an opportunity for mammalian life to emerge and dominate the planet now we i want to recall i want i want to remind everyone that we already have a crisis when we emerge from this one and it is no longer a crisis we still have our planetary crisis to cope with and any better world that we build locally has to exist in a world that is livable we've all talked about acting locally and i want to remind everyone that acting locally can have a broader uh impact we already have seen that little longmont was able to change energy policy for our entire northern colorado region by an act of its own and i hope that that will not be forgotten in the scramble to put things back together because we need to put things back together in a new way and that means building a new energy economy there are going to be a lot of opportunities i believe if we have a constructive government around us to use stimulus money for the new energy economy in 2009 president obama made an attempt to do that with his era energy grants and unfortunately the the technology wasn't really mature enough to have that have the big effect that he wanted it to have but the technology is mature enough now and we can build a new energy economy that is nothing like the old energy economy everyone has been talking about more cooperation more unity and more constructive way of doing business in the post reconstruction world and it's most important to understand that the fossil fuel economy was a tragedy of the commons most of all first of all a tragedy of the commons and because everyone was looking at their individual ownership we allowed that portion of our global economy to get completely out of control and foul the nest that we live in so the new energy economy that we have to build has to start locally it has to start immediately with acts like never subsidizing another fossil fuel structure in this city always promoting the common welfare in a way that's going to help us into the future that's that's going to not create a future bottlenecks for the most vulnerable people because what we know is whenever there is a crisis the most vulnerable people in the economy are hit the hardest so we need to go forward with a will acting locally but being aware that what we do is going to have an outsized influence on the world the global world that our children are going to grow up in thank you marcia christma gilbury uh businessman chair of the chamber commerce board of directors this year faculty member front-range community college dad right you've got a bunch of hats chris i do decide which ones you want to wear in responding to this question and take it away well first of all tim as everyone's mentioned thank you for taking the lead in such a very important project for our community and i'm looking at the 11 faces on my laptop screen and it's a true honor to participate in this discussion with you all and i appreciate your leadership that you provide our community um you know this is a very thoughtful question and we've all had time to reflect personally and in the multiple hats that i have in terms of being a father husband leader of the community uh and an educator and a business owner you know i've i've have a slightly different response to this question but all ties together what does the future look like i'm very very hopeful and your faces are a big reason why um you know it's going to look different you know as we progress forward our um as a community uh we have to understand that we have to be patient and this is not going to be a race to the finish line this is a marathon and um this recovery is going to happen but it's going to happen um in baby steps and i think so often in society there's this rush for instant gratification i want to see things so quickly um you know i'm looking at my mortgage statement i'm like oh my gosh i've got 27 more years you know so we want things so quickly i think it's very very important that we all recognize that patience is going to be a great virtue as we progress forward as a community um but i'm very very hopeful and uh we've been resilient in how we've responded to this crisis locally very impressed the advanced long mount partners um you know who you are have been meeting every single day um ldda the leadership from kimberley the city herald chamber scott led ledp jessica the list goes on and on just having you all come together collaborate and provide real-time information for our small business owners and our community very impressed um that gives me hope um and so i i've learned through this crisis to that we have people that care deeply for each other for our neighbors and um and so just a few months ago i want us all to remember that long mount was recognized as the number one boom town in america this was not by accident right i mean there were a lot of metrics that came into play and so uh gdp growth job creation growth our unemployment was below two and a half percent strong commerce entrepreneurship um investing in each other housing growth and we were recognized just a couple of months ago it wasn't that long ago we're the same community now because we have you we have the same people and so i truly believe that we are a long mount yes the context has changed dramatically um we understand that but our vision and the people haven't and a clear example of this and um herald and kimberley remember the first-demand revitalization study in 2011 that's one of the things that one of the first things that caught my eye in long mount when i decided oh this is a great community i mean it was this everything starts with a vision and we have the vision we've demonstrated that through the years and um but when we think about the future because i'm an educator and a business owner i want to highlight thriving education and thriving economy and what those mean briefly when i think of a thriving economy i think of an economy that's equitable for all who live work and play in long mount and it doesn't matter who we are doesn't matter you know what our education background is what bank bank we associate ourselves with what committee we serve on we have a sense of belonging and herald hit on this perfectly we all belong in long mount and we're proud to live in this community i think a lot of people may view business as bad and i think what we one of the things through this crisis we've all recognized is we need healthy businesses to provide opportunities for people right we need business growth and there's so much upside in value to our community when we have a thriving economy when it comes to education it's our number one priority as we develop a thriving community through teaching training and developing the talent locally to prepare people to be productive in their profession whatever given pathway they decide if it's developing a skill set and being a welder or robotics and going out and earning a working wage to support their family that's what long mod is we provide those opportunities and so strong entrepreneurship we've demonstrated this we have an amazing entrepreneurial ecosystem locally second to none innovate campus through the ledp e for all the chamber of commerce the chamber student network and so we have a lot of special things and which leaves me very hopeful for the future dress yep good setup for kimberley who's our cleanup hitter here kimberley mckay is our executive director of the long time long lot downtown development authority so of all the groups that have been deeply impacted organizationally i don't know that in every in every municipality across the country downtown businesses have really been impacted before the pandemic if people like downtown kimberley mckay is the one to thank right she's done an awesome job of bringing our small business owners together and doing remarkable things downtown and i know we're gonna we're gonna bounce back under her leadership kimberley pick it up from there thank you so much dr waterson and it's an honor to be with all of you and what a great project i have to say this is all um first and new things for all of us and in my whole life i've never been the closer in alphabetical order so this is new for me um i think to uh kind of reiterate what everyone is saying and really kept to kind of close it and bring it home it truly to me is all about our community it's about how we treat each other it's about what we do it's about our actions and i have had the extreme honor to work with our local businesses and to help with them to build a main street in a downtown core which in my mind has always been an extension of every single community member's neighborhood it's the one place that we can get out of our neighborhood and gather as neighbors in a different part of our community and meet new people and do new things and that's why i feel like local economies and downtowns are so important and so essential and to echo what a lot of you said we are at risk and we were at risk before this happened and still at risk of long month becoming a suburb and that's the last thing we want it to do so keeping that character keeping that local flair keeping that alive not only in the heart of our community but throughout all of our neighborhoods is so important i have worked with these local business owners we've talked to them daily and if you knew the lengths that they were going to to make sure that they could stay here for the community that they are listening to their customers that they have gone out of their way to say to their customers what will it look like when we reopen how can you feel safe what will you do what can we do for you these are folks that when you walk in and you see all of the things in their stores they've picked each and every one of them to know that it's going to meet a need in the community or someone in the community will love it or one of their customers will do it it's truly everything that the fabric of communities needs to be built on i feel and if you look at our main street you can see where jc penny started so remember everyone is a local business at one time right so supporting them are how they're growing into what else we see you know i think i said before to dr waters it might take a little extra minute to go and make this extra stop but i can guarantee you you will never regret it and it will strengthen the entire community each and every time you stop i think out of all of this the other thing i would say and i heard harold say it once and i've said it once some days you know this gets to the best of us and we're not our best selves and we need to remember when we're not being our best selves to stop and take a pause the thing about crisis is people come out of their silos right and they work together but they they creep back it happens they creep back and what we need to remember this time is we always say never forget but we need to never stop acting we need to act the way that we are today i have seen some of the uh these business owners that are you know um might have been competitors right and might have been looking to compete they are sharing ingredients they are sharing secrets they are swooping in doing they know that their neighbor needs to stay safe for them to stay safe their neighbor needs to stay open for them to stay open it truly is so intertwined so listen to your neighbors listen to your children listen to people that you don't know find out what those needs are in our community and just take a breath i think that we got into the fact where everybody was on fire and nothing was happening so don't get back into that mindset take a breath work together listen to each other and never stop acting and shop local thanks kimberley uh as i recall in in your interview these are we these are things we talked about that lessons that should be long remembered right we should not move too quickly uh into whatever that future is without bringing these with us so you've heard from one another uh are there is there anything you heard from one another that strikes you as opportunities for near-term action it's the breadth and scope of the challenge is enormous but we're going to start some places decline suggested leaders have to step in and do something so marsha i see your hand up what what have you heard well i'd like to acknowledge first of all that it is already happening which has been my mantra through this whole thing is that it is not too late to start working it's not too early excuse me to start working on the recovery you know i learned business principles literally at my father's knee because he was uh at the heyday of his career when i was just barely old enough to be curious about what he did at work and the first business term he taught me was rep reciprocity and i thought that was particularly appropriate now because we're trying to persuade everybody that they have to wear masks and that's a reciprocal endeavor you protect me i protect you that's the way it works it doesn't work if both people aren't part of that partnership and those two lessons come together with at least half the people on this screen right now are entering into a reciprocal effort in terms of saving our small businesses and i'm talking about the strong month campaign it's being funded by the city it's funded being funded by local donors it's being promoted and implemented by the longmont downtown development authority by ledp by everybody who has an existing network of business in this community and it's making sure not just giving them micro grants so that they can do what they have to do to get back into business and that's an important thing but it's using the opportunity to make sure that they're well advised in their approach to getting through this that they're not just looking at a two month horizon but but at a 12 month horizon or a 24 month horizon so that those businesses will be there when we're ready to spread our wings again so i think that's the most i mean these people you people have chosen the most actionable possible thing uh and and are already engaged in it i'm so encouraged by that that uh you know none of my hobby horses compare you know when you guys are on your feet again i'll start evangelizing um electrification and all that stuff because you're going to be able to afford it you hear me but right now the most important thing is keep doing what you're doing because it's it's brilliant it's the right thing to do and it's it's the it's the right first step so i'm glad you're taking that risk of understanding that it's not beating the guy next door to you it's surviving together anybody else want to weigh in jessica hi um marta mentioned specifically this idea of you know having a blank slate and i think we've all touched on it without saying it explicitly that our hopes for the future are dependent on us taking the opportunity of the blank slate that this crisis has created for us but she also used the example of financial literacy and the kind of blank slate opportunity we had related to that with the 2008 financial crisis and uh residential real estate um crisis that we had we did not do a very good job of taking advantage of that blank slate i think it's easy for us to uh talk about a blank slate talk about our best hopes for the future and then when the rubber hits the road we find it really easy to go back to old habits and go back to um our old normal and so i think um for me the most actionable thing that we can do is be very conscious of and be very intentional about taking it as a blank blank slate opportunity um to put into action a lot of the things that we've been talking about today and the things that we'll face as we move forward both from a public health and um environmental and economic perspective comments cheeky oh um i think jerry jessica made exactly the right point which is um it's really easy to fall back into old habits each of us has um an interesting and potentially compelling vision for the way that we want to see long month change in order to take advantage of the massive disruption that we're experiencing right now but in the absence of having a specific plan it's going to be really easy to say oh yeah you know we'll just go back to building wide roads and building suburbs and neighborhoods the way that we are right now so um i i think jessica has actually put out a very great call to action which is let's make a plan let's make specific plans for the things that are disrupted and the things that we want to see change and find the excuses to connect them to each other so that when we are in a position to start taking action on things again and as marcia said that could be right now we can say listen we need to fix this problem and this is the solution oh and it has these other nice follow-on benefits that we're also all interested in anyone else you hear that harrell well that plays a little bit to what we heard from dick lice as well yeah thinking about roles of government and and what's our role or government's role and then the role of the business community non-profit etc in both the planning and the and then the knitting together those plans in ways that allow us to be as adaptive and responsive as possible who else scott and then eric and then harrell and then chris take it away scott okay uh i i agree with the comments made about the clean slate i think it's also important to remember what we have done correctly in the past and build on that so uh marcia mentioned um i think she's referring to the work with prpa and things like that so there's a lot of things that we're being done already in the past too that we just need to continue to build on there's some things i think there are there is a clean slate or the can be a clean slate but then i think it's important to also look back and be like hey we did do some things right um we did a lot of things right in long month and i hope that long months a model for uh many of the things that we do right after this and it's still a model for many of the things that we did right before this here i was gonna say uh hackles a raise because we had like four waving hands there about you know defend long month um no actually i think i think what she keel said is true but i i do have to commend the city and what they do and the vision they have i mean that's herald and that's everybody in the city i mean i'm always amazed at like when you look at some of the infrastructure some of the things that we have that so many other cities don't have it just blows my mind and in a very basic level it's you know since we are in um our our phase of isolation and so i paper at home and moving into that and you know the even in the very stretch the greenway presents such a great asset to the community and just all the things like as i've been able to walk down the greenway and seeing all the changes that have occurred within that greenway and that's one particular project i mean there are other particular projects that we have no idea as citizens what's going on but i i'm just amazed at what the the city has been doing and what it's been up to and so i commend herald council mayor and everybody for being involved in that and making sure that we're pushing forward as dick lions would say there's always that kind of leadership moving forward um one final thought i didn't bring up to is is that my hope too for a future would be one that would include that nonprofits are actually considered businesses and not just this other thing we always say well then there's that nonprofit thing and really we just have different tax statuses but we're not a bunch of goofy you know hippies who just decided hey we're just going to start a business and we really don't have any clue what we're doing it really is i mean you're looking at major major businesses that happen to be nonprofit organizations and i would really like you know for us to kind of shift that like we're small businesses or we're medium-sized or actually in some instances we're very large businesses too so i'd like to see that future come out of this too herald sorry i had to unmute no i think it's um i think when you look at the future and where do you go um you know it's really been interesting and and i think we look at you know you want to be in a historian so my undergraduate degree is in history and and so you look at those who fail to learn from history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them i think the other side of that is you look from history successes and you bring that forward in terms of how how do you repeat your successes and how do you avoid your failures um and adjust as you're moving forward and and i think it is a blank blank slate um and i think it really is how do you engage the community i mean you will hear me say this you've heard engagement but it's really how do you engage the community to come together to focus on what we all commonly want that'll make our community great and how do you build on that via all of the processes that we have now at our disposal that we never had before and i'm a firm believer of you know your community is as good as your weakest link in the community you see it all the time what are the lessons that we've learned from the Midwest and in the older cities like Detroit and Cincinnati and Cleveland and those places and why are we why have we been more successful to some of Chris's points in in the the west and the southwest and and what is the difference and so how do we avoid those past mistakes how do we come together as a community how do we lift everyone up in the community and really continue defining that vision for the future in terms of where we want to be and what we want to be and how has that changed because of this situation always being mindful of we have to to Eric's point we have to embrace our differences we all have different ideas of what needs to occur but let's focus on that we all have the collective vision of making Longmont a great community and then from there you can build on anything in the future Chris yeah so um this crisis created a lot of problems for us all and a lot of different problems from housing to jobs to our security to small business so I like Shaquille's comments around let's solve some problems by engaging in conversation um that's inclusive and that involves the people that have experienced all the different problems and so I think it's also important to recognize the things we can control and the things that we can't and I struggled with this and I still struggle with this in business particularly you know I mean going through when we redeveloped the main street four or five years ago and I used to explain to my wife why should I go to why should I go to work today I can't access my parking lot and that lasted several months and so um and I'll never remember I'll never forget that my wife I go what should I do she goes you know what you should do when I go I really don't I'm at loss of words I have to park like two blocks away from my business so if I can't get to the parking lot my customers can't and I'll never forget this Steph said she's a she's a brilliant woman she goes Chris you know what to do you go to work and I was like huh okay and then something happened you make those you you know through time progress happens and so I think we have to keep that in mind going back to my point earlier around just patience and um and getting everybody involved in and moving our community forward to make baby steps and progress and really I saw you wanting to weigh in yeah just that just a few things I do think we need to set policies start making decisions about the world that we want to live in and we we really need to do what we need to do to make sure that Longmont um stays and evolves with these principles that we're talking about right now and how do we do that and how do we continue to do that with a strong vision you know I grew up in some of those rust belt towns that Harold was talking about and um I think that I and I was there for a lot of the rebounding for those and when I came here it was interesting because it's a different kind of spirit here and I'll tell you in those Midwest towns I likened it to a football team right you had to lock arms you had to march in together or else nothing was going to happen sometimes around here I feel like sometimes it's a bike race right and people will draft on each other and then they sprint off to win the race this can't be a bike race this has to be I'm a big sports person this has to be kind of a lock arms and walk together in a football like way and I think if we do that we set policies and we stay the course we don't just turn around because they're coming at us we stay that course and work together that's where we're going to get one of those long to be long remembered lessons anyone else Marta so one of the pieces um that I want to two different things I think the data is going to be really important for us and so that would be one of my kind of encouragement is because we need to have a baseline um we have a lot of data that's not desegregated right now that's not addressing our demographics it's not addressing I'm just something as simple as is who is the disparities in homeownership right now so that we know what's happening in the future to look back even at the last 10 years etc that's one of the pieces that I hope that we can do better so that we have a place to say okay actually we did move the needle here this year and then two years from now whatever that is as we develop some of these policies and these programs um one of the other pieces is really we talk about engagement and we need to get out of the box I used to tell my students this all the time like this is if this is your experience that's all you know and I understand that and how do we get out of that and and and that's part of the encouragement i.e. who are the people I did some work after flood recovery with our SIRT team at with the city of Longmont and their volunteers that get involved um in in recovery and the question that they brought up is when we have a city like Longmont um that has 5,000 permits of apartment building over the last several years how do we know those community members how do we welcome folks and how do we know in a time of disaster be it this or the next one that we have in a natural disaster where they are and what we how can we let them know our resources that exist and so one of those pieces would be like how do we use our local HOAs to really connect with communities are those HOAs right now and I know a few you know in my housing work um and doing housing resource conversations that reached out to their landlords right away to let them know here's what's happening and here's some resources for your tenants so that we don't have people um displaced but how do we really engage some of these other associations that we might not be thinking about um in our previous with you know previous life but how do we move forward with our neighborhood group leader association that's great amazing program that we have here in the city of Longmont and how do we build on that so that we make sure that we are reaching out to the sectors of community that I guarantee you right now are still out on the fringes even though we have big hearts and we have great intentions and and it almost seems like you know we go back to the old concept of a phone tree which you know we used to do those in our big employees we used to have a phone tree that lines down and now we just assume someone's at the end of the email and that's not accurate so from a healthcare industry um I'm on the Longmont uh United Hospital Board of Directors and one of the concepts we talked about with national directors almost two years ago was the idea of educators who do home visits but doing that in the healthcare industry are we doing that in our public service industries and we talk about policies and procedures some of it's like get out of the box and because we the other danger and going forward is just assuming everybody's jumping on to a zoom meeting or facebook live and so we just have to how can we do it more creatively in fun ways that are going to really touch people and connect with people so I'm encouraged by this conversation all right now if I don't see another hand go up I'm going to put a wrap on this let me finish one let me let me say one last thing all right which is uh what Harold said about history I think that history uh doesn't repeat but it definitely rhymes you've all heard that before and I think that you all have really said some amazing stuff I can't really I don't want to repeat any of it but I think that it's super important that we figure out what's next which Kil said with several of you uh mirrored we need to maybe set up a task force something of that nature something that kind of pulls us together this group plus additional groups and really have some action out of this I'd love to see that happen so and I'll and I'll participate whatever there's an offer well I'm not going to use this session oh Jessica go ahead sorry I just wanted to add one thing that was kind of top of mind for me and we've heard from everyone and I think everyone in the community um as Harold said um has the best interests of this community in mind and wants to uh one wants to recover and be resilient and go back to being the best long month that we know and love and and potentially even better and I just want to make sure because this happens a lot and I've actually taken myself off of social media entirely right now because of this that we don't get into the habit of demonizing those with whom we disagree on the methods um to get there and rather that we engage in conversations um to identify commonalities versus and demonizing those with whom we disagree on the methods on how we get to what we agree is um the best vision of long want possible I hope everybody in town listens to this this program it's all great advice any other comments I just wanted to say after after what Jessica said one of the one one of the most important things about this conversation is that nobody refuted anybody so that's a fabulous basis to begin with you've set a great example for how that should happen right now anybody else I'm going to wrap this up in a I am the prototypical baby boomer right uh or stereotypical baby but I'm going to wrap this up in a typical baby boomer way I'm going to I'm going to read something that plays off of I think Chris brought up patience and how important it is but what patience I think should mean during this period of the pandemic as we're now in the safe at home and we have no idea what the what the future in terms of the phasing back to normalcy it's going to require patience so I'm going to read a paraphrased quote from Henry Nowan uh recognized as the the most influential theologian of the 20th century so these aren't his words these are my paraphrase of his words so if it's if it's a mistake I don't want to I don't want him to have to take the blame I will uh but he he he he sets it up because he writes about patience this way how do we wait in this case for the end of this pandemic we wait with patience the patience does not mean passivity waiting patiently is not like waiting for the bus to come the rain to stop or the sun to rise it's an act of waiting in which we live the present moment to the full order to find there the signs of the future we're waiting for you all are waiting patiently in the Henry Nowan sense right to find here the signs of the future that you're moving us toward so thanks for that kind of patience thanks for your leadership in this community thanks for the incredible contributions you all make the long run and uh my gratitude again for your contributions to this project and this is going to wrap up the first phase of Longmont Voices Envision be safe stay healthy take care of yourselves thank you too thanks everyone thank you thank you all take care