 All right, so it's gonna be a little loud always, but we'll all try here to be focused. So the microphones work pretty well. If anyone has any trouble hearing at any point, let me know. And I don't know what I can do about it, but I have a friend back here that will probably be able to help. My name is Vanessa Ericardi. I know many of you actually. I own a management and marketing consulting firm here in Davis. I started my career in politics, so it's my pleasure to be the moderator tonight. And I'd like to just start out with a quick thank you to our sponsors, obviously the Davis Chamber Pack. As many of you know, the Davis Chamber Pack is different than the Davis Chamber of Commerce, and it relies completely on fundraising to exist. And we are lucky in town that we have a pack with our chamber. Not every chamber has that, and it's so important to be informed about political decisions because, as you know, business and politics are so related. So thanks to the Davis Chamber Pack for sponsoring the event tonight. Thanks also to Suedwork Brewing Company and then our friends here at Davis Media Access that will be helping us out, like I said, if you have any problems hearing. I feel like the chamber did an excellent job picking a moderator tonight, but six months pregnant. So I will be, so it's like I will be not drinking and keeping the time on time. We've actually said, but if I do have to run to the bathroom, I get as long as I want. You get 60 seconds for your answers, but that's how it's, no, I'm just kidding. All right, there's my joke. I have no more. I just used it. Okay, thank you, thank you. Okay. All right, so we're going to start with opening remarks from the candidates. Those will be two minutes each. Then we're going to go to candidate responses for each question and we're going to put those at 60 seconds each so that we have time for audience questions. I will start the order in the order you're seated with Lucas, Will, Matt and Brett and then each question will just bump one over if I mess up, feel free to call me on it. And Susan here, Susan Kirby will be our expert timekeeper. She has a yellow light at 30 seconds and a red light at a minute. And she's going to have a sweet smile on the yellow light and then a, you know what smile at the 60 second light. All right, so we will start with opening remarks then and so council member Frerichs will start it off. Great. All right, well, good evening everybody. Yep, I knew that one. Good evening everybody. My name is Lucas Frerichs. Thanks all for being here this evening. Appreciate the chamber of commerce, the chamber pack, suit work also for hosting this. Can we work on the feedback? My time is over. Lucas just used his joke. We're hearing a fair amount of feedback though. So anyway, okay. I've been proud to serve on the city council for the past four years, elected first in 2012. 2016 is a really important year for both my wife Stacy and I. It marks 20 years of us both after having been in Davis 20 years ago, came in 1996 separately but met over that time and have been very involved in the community since that point. The past four years for myself in terms of city council has really been a timeframe that we've been focused on getting important work done for the community. First and foremost, getting the city's fiscal house in order, there were a lot of restructuring of programs. The city reduced its workforce by 103 positions over the past few years. And yet we also worked on negotiating contracts and making sure that the city had an adequate budget surplus as well and budget reserve, excuse me. We've also been taking care of the business with regard to infrastructure needs. Chief among those items is the surface water project with the city of Woodland University, California, Davis delivering a sustainable source of water to the community is gonna be imperative for the next hundred years in this community. And it's really something I'm very proud of and all while coming in under $60 million under budget. Also the wastewater treatment plant is underway, brand new after 45 years old. We're rebuilding that. Also we've been putting millions of dollars into bike paths and road maintenance, much needed road maintenance. And those are not all necessarily really exciting sort of items, but I'll tell you, those are the things that need to be done in this community. And then in the years to come, I'm hoping to work on a variety of things. Our city's general plan is outdated. It does need updating. It was outdated as of 2010, but it was last actually the process for updating. It was 1993 to 2000. I'm looking forward to working on community choice energy, bringing cheaper and greener power to the city of Davis and also continued infrastructure upgrades, especially in terms of roads and bike paths and some of our other major needs. Thanks very much. Thank you, Will Arnold. So I'll also thank the Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber of Pack, Suedwork Brewery, DMA, everybody involved in putting this on. My name is Will Arnold. I'm a Davis resident since birth. I was just in the chamber office the other day meeting with Emily, setting up my chamber membership for my new business, mother and baby source, which we just purchased. That would be the third chamber membership that I'm currently a part of, president of the Davis High Blue and White Foundation, who are proud chamber members. Also an individual member, so that I can be at Celebrate Davis and other good things as a candidate and of course now the store as a chamber member. But I had to take a moment when I was at the office to go, as I said to Emily, go visit the family. So I went into the boardroom and said hi to my grandpa, my dad and my sister, who were all presidents of the Chamber of Commerce over the decades here. So I think it might go without saying I feel a very deep personal connection, not just to Davis, but to Davis, not just to the business community in general, but to the Chamber of Commerce in particular. And so thank you all for the work that you do. And I hope that you'll see me and my candidacy as somebody who is familiar with the issues that are important to you, familiar with the challenges that business people face. I'm somebody who has had to make payroll and as I said, currently an employer in town. I'm not sure if I'm the only one up here, but I think that's important insight when you're making decisions on behalf of people in Davis that you also know some of the challenges that business people face. So again, thank you for the opportunity to be here tonight and to share some of my ideas. Class of 1997. Thank you, Will. And Matt Williams. Hi, I'm Matt Williams, candidate for city council. This election in my campaign are about whether you think that doing the same things over and over again is going to produce different results. With all due respect to the accomplishments that Lucas has laid out, I'm a member of the Finance and Budget Commission and because of our hard push to try and understand what it is we owe to ourselves, we owe $655 million over the next 20 years in unfunded capital infrastructure and retirement liabilities. That's $32 million a year. Our current budget is $50 million. We're gonna have to move our budget from 50 to 80. Any of you who are running a business know that trying to increase your expense budget by 60% is gonna be incredibly challenging. 103 positions that have been reduced have ended up with our total compensation being $3 million more than it was before we made the cut. It's moved from $50 million a year to $53 million a year. So the average pay for an employee is moved from $105,000 to $155,000. We need to be doing reliable, repeatable processes that weaken all business and citizens alike rely on. And I have a commitment to making that kind of reliable environment be the rule in Davis, not the exception. I think that if we do that, we do those open, transparent, repeatable processes. We will have fewer lawsuits. We will have a much better business environment and we will all thrive. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Lee. My name's Brett Lee. I'm running for a reelection to the Davis City Council. I was just sort of thinking about what Matt just said there. So I'll probably veer a little away from what I was thinking I'd initially talk about. So the city of Davis faces a variety of challenges and I think one of the interesting things is when I first ran and got elected, a lot of people didn't know who I was and they kind of looked at the people who had endorsed me and thought, uh-oh, the nice thing about being an incumbent is you have a track record. And so, whether we've agreed or disagreed, I think people have found me to be pretty reasonable and thoughtful and definitely well prepared. And my decisions are based upon the objective facts. And when we hit a point where it's subjective in nature, I clearly call it out. I think Davis has a history of perhaps some faulty decision-making in terms of, oh, well, you know, we're good friends with this union person or good friends with that business. And, you know, Davis is big enough and mature enough that projects should rise or fall based upon their merits, not for some intrinsic knee-jerk reaction either yes or no. Oh, well, this is my good friend, so of course we're gonna do this. No, we can all compete and try to have it as level of playing field as possible. And that's what we want. I mean, that's why you're part of the chamber because the chamber, I think, the voice was a little too quiet in the community. And as we see with Measure A and the Water Project, the no on everything crowd has a pretty loud voice which I think is disproportionate to the rest of the community. And in terms of what Matt has to say, I think I'll be able to touch on that a little bit in the next question. But the Davis problems that we face are a combination of some of the previous decisions of the city of Davis, but also some of the things that are going on at the state and federal level. So we can't blame the pension crisis simply on Davis. We can't blame the road repair issues simply on the city of Davis. The state and the federal government have had a hand to play in that. And I'll touch on that more later. All right, thank you very much. And thank you, Susan. All right, we're rolling along here and now we will start the question portion of the evening. So we have nine questions prepared and then we will open it up for audience questions. And again, one minute response per question. All right, first question jumping right in and we will start with Will Arnold answering. Many cities, Davis included, have experienced a backlog of infrastructure maintenance. The governor has proposed an investment of $57 billion in state infrastructure over the next five years with a focus on deferred maintenance. If elected, how will you ensure that the backlog of infrastructure maintenance projects, specifically transportation and road maintenance will be mitigated? What communication systems will you put in place to ensure that residents stay apprised of construction and improvements that may affect their day-to-day travel? So that sounds like a lot of money, right? Hey, the state's gonna give a 50-some odd billion for infrastructure. All right, let's get us some of that. Well, we're talking about the eighth largest economy in the world, the biggest state and the third biggest country in the world. 50 million, 57 million, billion, sorry, 57 billion is, it's not gonna do it for the whole state. And if I know anything about state politics, which I think I do, a lot of that's gonna travel south and end up in Los Angeles. So my opinion is we ought to move forward with the mentality that we're not gonna see a penny of that. And so if we wanna truly address our infrastructure needs in town, we need to diversify our revenue portfolio and focus on economic development in town and make these serious choices for revenue that happens internally. I don't think we can expect that the state's gonna save us. Thank you, Matt Williams. I agree with Will, the concept of ensuring that we're gonna twist the arm of the state. We aren't gonna twist the arm of the state. We can do everything we can to lobby them. We can work with our local representatives at the state level, but we can't. The real meat of this question is the second part. Why do we have a lawsuit now with the Nishi project? Well, the reality is, is that we have broken down our communications. We have opened the door. We have handed a loaded weapon to people who want to cause disruption in our community. We need to communicate to you, the voters. You're not only business people, but you're individual voters. We need to inspire confidence. We, on the Finance and Budget Commission, I'm a member of the Finance and Budget Commission, sent a recommendation to council that they not add any additional taxes until two things they could say explicitly what it's for. More importantly saying it, oh, sorry. Thank you very much. You're the way, you're the way that I am. I would like to give credit where credit's due for really watching the time, too. It's painful to try to end early, and thank you so much. So next is council member Lee. Yeah, so a couple of quick things. So on the Finance and Budget Commission, it was a slightly underpowered commission, and actually Lucas and I interviewed a variety of people, and we purposely recommended people to that commission who we thought could make it more of a dynamic and forceful entity to help provide information to the council. So the information is definitely helpful. So I can say that we do want transparency, we do want the facts out in the open. Right now we're paying about four million, wow, 30 seconds goes by quick. When Lucas and I took office, we were spending about $0 in road repairs. Currently we spend about four million a year in road repairs, and really the recommendation is we should be closer to spending $8 million a year. And you hear that there's a four million shortfall, and that's fairly dramatic, but when you think about, we recently approved a hotel and were likely to approve another hotel, that's gonna generate another $2 million in yearly revenue. Wow, okay, allow it to be continued, I suppose. Council member Fritz. Susan is brutal with the timer there, no. So the question goes to some of the infrastructure updates that are needed. The city council in the past two years has put in $8 million in road repair infrastructure and bike path repair. You've seen some of these upgrades, 8th Street, East Covell, Lake Boulevard, Billard Drive, B Street, those are all streets that have been repaved fully in the past several years. There's a lot more work to do, though. On tap for 2016, we've got Mace Boulevard, the L Street as well, the Russell Bike Path. Richards Interchange is a top priority, certainly. We can expect about 80% of the Richards Interchange to be funded by the feds and state government without 20% coming locally and that's a huge priority for the city, of course. And then just the communication issues. The repaving last summer was sadly quite unfortunate that the timeline slipped and coincided with the pipeline construction, which caused major traffic impacts around town. That was the second part of the question. We need to frankly include clauses in the contracts that if the timeline slips, we need to have penalties on those contracts so we don't make sure we're on time with our projects. Thank you. All right, question two. So this question will start with Matt Williams. Last November, the Board of Regents of the University of California approved a budget to enroll an additional 10,000 California undergraduates for the next three years, including 5,000 freshmen and transfer students in 2016 to 17. Can you guys still hear me okay? And you have the questions in front of you, correct? Okay, just in case. With room on campus to grow, UC Davis is said to be one of the UCs most significantly impacted by this increased enrollment. What role do you believe the city should play in supporting this growth and if elected, how will you ensure that Davis has the resources to provide adequate housing to the new students, current students and current residents impacted by it? Is it, are you hearing me, there we go, there we go. Too close. All right, the reality is, is that if the governor can't hold the university accountable because of the California constitution, we can't. But what we need to do is to create a collaborative win-win environment working with them. We need to transform the arm's length relationship that exists right now into a more constructive one. Regardless, what ends up happening is that the students who want to live off campus, they can just go and bid for rent. So we end up in a situation where we have a supply demand situation that is out of control. We have much, much more demand than supply. It's one of the reasons I support yes on A is that's 1500 beds that is going to contribute to the supply and be able to keep housing more affordable in Davis. Four seconds. Thank you. Very nice. Maybe you can have that back in the next question. All right, council member Lee. So here's an important thing, that the university is its own sovereign entity, just like Woodland is its own sovereign entity, but we share a border, we share a lot of us work there, a lot of people, we have a lot of interconnectedness. The thing that I think is important is that one of the things that, you know, the council has been criticized in some respect because we're fairly collegial, you know, but the reality is, we are collegial, but we often disagree on things, but we're able to work together. And I think that's where we have a real strength when the new chancellor arrives. When the new chancellor arrives, we'll be able to work with that person and show that we're a unified body on some very important things that the university needs to help the community out with, and we will be able to show that the community can help the university out. In the past and the not too distant future, if you got the council, I mean, they would almost literally be at each other's throats. And you know, why would the university even bother negotiating with the council when it was such a divided and sort of not, it wasn't a constructive exercise. And I know for a fact that, you know, many entities didn't want to deal with a council just because of that open hostility between its members. Council member Fritz? Yeah, the growth of the UC system and particularly UC Davis is certainly one of the most important issues facing our community, there's no question. You know, I think it's incumbent upon the city to assume some of the responsibility for some of the new housing. We have several proposals before us, the Lincoln 40 proposal on Olive Drive, the Nishi proposal, those will certainly be, if approved, will assist in that regard. But also UC Davis, it's incumbent upon UC Davis to also take on some of that responsibility. If they're going to have this growth, they need to work on building housing on campus. We have local, you know, builders here, local developers who have partnered with the university previously in building housing on campus. That kind of partnership can be replicated again, I'm quite confident in that. Collaboration with the university, of course, is essential and frankly, as Brett mentioned as well too, you know, the collaboration that happens now amongst the current council, I think lends itself to a future collaboration with the university as they work on their new long range development plan and also as the city works on its new updated general plan. Also, there's been, of course, this increase in mini dorms and actually we'll talk a little bit more of that later on. Will Arnold? So I'll pick up, I think, where Lucas was going on this, which is we have this incredibly low, effectively zero rental vacancy rate in town. That's 0.2%, meaning we have roughly 8,000 apartment units in town, so at any given time, fewer than 20 are available, okay? So, and that has a whole host of problems for our city, not just for the renters, but definitely for the renters. Thank you, Emily. And, you know, it makes things more expensive. Folks don't have to upkeep apartments like they would if there was real competition. But also, that has effects for our community at large. We have mini dorms popping up in our neighborhood. That affects potentially your home's value, but your neighborhood, it's also a place where maybe a young family would be able to live, but they can't now because of student housing. And then you have, there's environmental impacts of that, which is folks who can't find a place to live coming to study at UCD, traveling from outside of town. So they're driving, they're not biking to class like we would want them to be. This next question will be kicked off by Council Member Lee. Here it goes. Several recommendations were made in the city housing element update adopted in 2014 and lasting through 2021. Recently, many housing projects have been proposed, such as Sterling and Trackside. If elected, how will you use the housing element update as a guide to make decisions around these new developments and issues? So the housing element update is incomplete because the general plan is incomplete and there are many aspects of zoning and other aspects of the general plan that are in need of updating. So it's a helpful document, but it is not going to, it will help guide in a general sort of sense. I mean, just to give you a sense of what it talks about, it talks about quality of life, small town character, diversity, arts and culture. There's a variety of things, but when it comes down to those specific projects, I'll just say it. I think Trackside is too big and doesn't fit well with the existing neighborhood. That doesn't mean I'm no on Trackside, but it should be relatively appropriate in size and scale. And I feel the same way about the Trackside proposal. It's too big as proposed. It should be more in line in the size and scale of what is currently zoned there. I think zoning is very important for people. And when you buy your home and you live in, most of you probably live in homes, there's an expectation that the zoning in your neighborhood will be respected. Council Member Furricks. Yeah. So I served on the city's housing element task force in 2007, 2008, the most recent update we just did now just a couple of years ago, but so I went through this two year process before and we provided a ranked listing nearly with 30 sites for housing. We went through that almost that entire list. Some of those sites have been built, some have not. There's a potential to go back through that list again. But some of the sites that have been built in the past 10 plus years have been the Verona site, the Willow Bank part, they've been completed. The Del Rio live work lofts are being built right now. Amazing project on Del Rio Place in Pena. Canaries underway, Grande Villages coming, Child's Ranch will be coming. So infill has to be done right. And truly, I have hands-on experience doing it right. I live in an infill project. Shepherd's Close on B Street. The Parkside Place. Some of the other downtown infill projects are excellent. But we need to make sure that the design is key and we need to make sure these things fit with the neighborhood. And then of course, and that's of course working in conjunction with the neighbors. But also an updated general plan is needed and we'll probably talk more about the updated general plan later on. Great, Will Arnold. So along with council member Frerichs, and I believe others, but he and I have been very vocal about this, calling for a new general plan. We have a lot of updates that have been made to this general plan. The general plan we're operating under, it was adopted in 2001. It said it was supposed to go until 2010. It said it was supposed to be for a city capped out at 60,000 people. That's not the reality we're living in. But the process for that general plan started in 1993. So it predates Al Gore's invention of the internet. It predates the concept really of global warming. It predates a lot of things that are now, it predates the growth, massive growth of the university. There's a lot of realities that we're living with right now. It predates Lucas in town. I mean, come on. So, yeah, he was just, we were all just kids. Anyway, so that's a real key here is what we have now. While the general plan is a good and thoughtful document, there's a lot of gaps and there's a lot of contradictory overlapping stuff. So this would be a key priority of mine to focus on a new general plan. Thank you, Matt Williams. The housing element is policy, but the real problems we have with regard to development here in Davis have to do with process. We need to change the planning process so that it promotes proactive thinking rather than reactive thinking. Considering zoning variance needs to be inclusive. It needs to include the people within the community. One of the challenges we have is the current process is not reliable or repeatable because the general plan says that the maximum population of the city is 64,000. We passed 64,000 people a long time ago. Every single application that changes land use needs to be handled as a general plan exception. If we simply change that 64,000 to a number that's greater than the 65,622 that we have from the census, now we could be handling some of these things ministerially and not being bitten by the process. Thank you. All right, there's a theme here. Next question, also development related. And this question, we will start with council member Frerichs, I believe. All right, the Mace Ranch Innovation Center project has been put on hold as the developer evaluates feasibility in light of a no housing requirement. Do you support the Mace Ranch Innovation Center? Why or why not? If you are in support of it, how will you ensure that projects like these do not encounter such setbacks in the future? So the project, of course, the Mace Ranch Innovation Center project's on hold. It's been stated that it's on hold due to the lack of ability to proceed with housing. I think that that was the proposal that the city asked for. And I also think that aside from the housing issues, whether inclusion of housing or not, there are a number of other issues that exist with the Mace Ranch Innovation Center proposal. I think chief among them is the ag mitigation proposal that wasn't fully fleshed out, but there are a variety of issues that exist there. I'm confident, though, that we can work together to get something that would work for the voters. But I also think that we, of course, as the city needed diversification of revenue, first and foremost, and make sure that we have room for our current businesses and new ones to expand and grow here in the community. I have a strong track record of supporting some of these businesses' expansions, including Mori Saki's approval when I was chair of the Planning Commission, Expression Systems, right out here on Second Street, as well, approval of their new headquarters, as well as Gold Standard Dynastic, excuse me, and then, of course, Davis Root, as well. So Davis Roots, I think, is the incubator. Very important. So I'm proud to be supportive of those. Thank you, Will Arnold. So as candidates, we've had a few bites at this apple. We were asked at the Vanguard Forum. We were asked by the Sierra Club. We were asked by the Vanguard for a written response. And in all of those opportunities, I was the only candidate to indicate support for the Mace Ranch Innovation Center. Now, granted, there were caveats and nuances. There's still a lot to learn about that project. There's still a lot of details to be hashed out, but I am a strong and vocal supporter of this project. Our community came together through DeSide and the Innovation Park Task Force through the city council process and other through the chamber and came up with a plan, did a request for expression of interest for very specific sites. Mace was chief among them, and in my opinion, that's the best spot for this because it has interstate 80 frontage. It has the infrastructure there. I'm a strong supporter of this project and I want to see it built. Matt Williams. The Mace project didn't float or not float based on housing. Yes, that was a contributor. But as you step up a level, the strategy of leveraging the research programs and intellectual capital of UC Davis is solid. The pauses, like the Mace Ranch Innovation Center, are due to failures at the tactical level. When we at Finance and Budget received the report by David Zender from EPS, he couldn't justify a sale price other than $9 to $13 a square foot. If we're going to leverage that UC Davis intellectual capital, and it won't pencil out until $20 a square foot, and what we have failed to do is to be able to bring to the community examples of where that kind of model has succeeded. It's independent of housing. We need to show that we have something other than a generic business part. Council Member Lee. So I have a slightly different opinion. Why on earth would I support a proposal based upon a glossy brochure? We don't know what the actual details are of Mace. And the perfect example is Nishi. I support Nishi. And what swung it was the details about Nishi. The developer at Nishi has said that they will not occupy that site until the connection to the university is complete and Caltrans reconfigures the Richard interchange, which dramatically impacts the feasibility of that site and the negative impacts to the community. The negative impacts are mitigated. So these types of details matter. So the people saying, oh, I love Mace or I don't like Mace, we don't know what Mace is. So imagine the housing component. It matters whether those 850 units were built in years one, two, or three, or whether they were triggered at the 50% buildout point or the 75% buildout point. Is Mace Innovation Center a housing proposal or is it an innovation center proposal with mixed use components? We don't know that until the details. And so I can't say I'm for it or against it till I see it in front of me. Just like I took that stand with Nishi and Nishi, the detail showed up and I support it. Okay, thank you. Next question will be led off by Will Arnold and this is also innovation related. We've seen exemplary growth in the past several years with the addition of Davis roots. Jumpstart Davis, the proposed innovation park and co-working spaces. If elected, what will you do to ensure that Davis continue its growth and momentum in innovation? So here's what happens sometimes in our community. We invite everyone to the table. We have big meetings. We publish them in the newspaper. A lot of people come, a diverse group of people come. Let's call those meetings in this example, D-Side. And we all sit around the table. We come up with a plan. We come up with very, very specific pieces of the plan. It goes in front of commissions. It goes in front of the council. And then finally it comes in front of the community and the folks that want to either kill it or they want to take their pound of flesh, they use as one of the things they throw up against the wall to see what sticks, they say, you know what we didn't have is enough community outreach. And then folks who are your elected leaders turn around and say, you're right, we should start this community outreach process over again. That happened with the water project. It's happening right now with Nishi and Mace and our city's innovation plan. We came together as a community. We made a plan. Now is the time to act and it takes leadership to do so. Matt Williams. This question builds on the last one. So I'm going to start with the $9 sale price. If we're selling generic business, whether it's downtown or in the innovation centers, we're making a mistake. What we need to be doing is saying how we're special. To do that, the city, the innovation center developers and UCD need to work together to build a rock solid documentation of clear examples of evidence of how this kind of intellectual synergy is going to create value. If we are creating additional value then achieving higher sales per foot, being able to pay the rents in the downtown things are going to be much easier. We are not capitalizing on the core competencies of UC Davis enough. We need to do more to be a better partner with them. Council member Lee. So Lucas and I have an advantage on this one in that our track record as sitting council members show that we've supported Jumpstart Davis and Davis Roots. In terms of the specific question about innovation, one of the things we're currently doing is supporting this idea of a fiber optic network for Davis. And that's an important thing because when I'm at my daytime job, I've done site selection for my company and we look for fiber optic. Davis, just matter of factly, has slow internet access and expensive internet access. And if you want to attract the high tech companies of today and tomorrow, that needs to change. And so it's not just about sort of these sort of new businesses. Sometimes it has to do with the infrastructure available to the existing businesses and that infrastructure to attract future businesses. Council member Furricks. Yeah, I'm like bread set. I mean, we've been supportive of the Jumpstart Davis programming, certainly Davis Roots. I'm amazed at the amount of startups that have come out of Davis Roots. The biggest one so far that's grown out of Davis Roots is Brobo. They are a STEM robotics educational company. They build robots, educational robots for K through 12. They are now at roughly 25 employees in an office and upstairs in downtown Davis. I do not want to lose them to another community. Those people, many of them who are young people too, who are working for Brobo, need to stay in this community. So it's essential for us to continue to find places for them to stay here in Davis. I also appreciate that Area 52, Sierra Energy, there's this new hacker lab that's being built in South Davis and the former molar sky car factory or lab space. We need flex space, wet lab space as well. And I also think Nishi proposal will help with the 350,000 square feet of proposed R&D space. So those are all some concrete examples of ways that we can keep continuing the innovation in Davis. Thank you. Okay, so Matt Williams, you'll lead this next one off. Also about business growth and innovation. Despite the city's business growth in the past several years, many companies who have established or expanded their business in Davis have indicated that the process is arduous, often resulting in higher than expected expenses and extended timelines in achieving initial deliverables. Cities like Palo Alto and Livermore have been cited as benchmark business friendly examples with tools like online permitting and comprehensive instruction kits for use by business owners to get started. To what extent are you aware of this problem and what will you do during your term to create a business friendly environment that encourages new businesses to come to Davis? Yesterday at the government relations committee of the chamber of which I'm a member, we discussed this issue and I, because of my membership on the finance and budget commission, was able to share with both the city staff and the members of the chamber on how we are fighting to be able to bring the technology of the city up to date. We have a information system that supports the city that was built in 1990 running on an AS 400. It's antiquated, it's beyond antiquated. We need to be able to manage expectations and make it so that the surprises don't happen. This is key investment in our infrastructure and the finance and budget commission and our Monday meeting last recommended $500,000 put into a business process re-engineering so that this problem wouldn't continue to exist. It would be solved shortly. Council Member Lee. So yeah, the process for business expansion. Location in Davis definitely should be streamlined. The idea is not to minimize the regulations or eliminate them, but to make them just easier and more easier to navigate, right? So we have to have standards in terms of what we expect. The same can be said for some of the residential issues. You'd be surprised at the number or maybe you wouldn't be surprised at the number of complaints I get from people who try to do simple remodels and the crazy, ridiculous permitting processes and inspections and things. And I just think from top to bottom it's not just about business aspects. It's just the city has sort of grown a little bit, not completely supervised. I've been on the council for three and a half years. I've been with three different city managers. When you have that turnover at the top it's really hard to stay focused and actually see something through. These types of changes take a sustained, steady effort. It's not gonna be done in three months. It's a multi-year process. I voted against his project, but Jim Kidd often will call me and tell me about all the headaches and heartaches he's having trying to build his little development there on B Street. And it's really eye-opening and actually quite troubling. Okay. So council member Lee, you get to now kick off the next. I'll answer that question. I'll answer this one. And the last one there. Yes. Council member Frerick. Thank you. I thought something funny was going on there. I was getting a little ahead of myself. All right. Actually I'll have to pick up right where Brett left off. It's not just limited to businesses. The issues of streamlining permits. It's also residential as well. It's needed for both. We'll take Parkside Place as an example. An amazing infill development at the corner of 4th and D. You had four empty nester couples who had four single-family homes that tried to do the right thing by building a multi-story, three-story, beautiful building where they could live close to downtown, walking, shopping, approximated all those things. And they were stymied pretty much at every turn and different points by the city. They're trying to do the right thing and yet we were punishing them. So the process can be long, arduous and subjected to sometimes what we collectively know as the sort of Davis spanking machine. But I will say that Rochelle and I have taken, as one area where I've worked with the council member Swanson on, we've taken this issue quite seriously working with both staff and also the planning commission on working on process, the permit streamlining. Some communities like Elk Grove and Rancho Cordova have 24-hour permitting. That's not gonna happen in Davis. But we can definitely make it much more easy for folks to get things done in this community. Thank you. While still maintaining major safeguards as well too. Thank you. That was very nice. Yeah, we got to hear it. Thank you. Well, I'm still up too. You are. Yeah, thank you. Go ahead. Will Arnold. I'm measuring ahead with this. So we drive a pretty hard bargain here in Davis as well we should, right? This is Davis. We have a lot of expectation that folks are gonna do the right thing for community benefit. They're gonna do the right thing for the environment. They're gonna preserve our historical resources. But we're aware of what those things are. So it shouldn't come as a surprise to our staff. The fact that we have a high bar doesn't mean the process needs to grind the gears to a halt. Those are two separate things. And we can make it very clear through our processes. These are the boxes that need to be checked. But if you check those boxes, we're gonna move forward. And I know again, from my experience, from a business family and from working in business, but that most times folks just want the government to get out of the way, right? And so they know that when they're doing business in Davis that there's a high price to pay because it's worth it. But if we could make that process better, and that's also incumbent upon us to do constituent service, which is what I do professionally to help move these things along in a reasonable fashion. Okay, thank you. All right, Council Member Lee, we're ready now. I just wanted to make sure you really, really knew that. Here we go. Outside of new business growth, what else will you do to support economic development in Davis if elected? For example, as the city compensation base grows, how will you mitigate unfunded liabilities and what strategies will you use for cost containment? How will you ensure that needed funds stay within the city to support schools, parks, and the like? So this, my answer touches on the previous one a little bit. I've been a member of the core area specific plan group, which is two members of the city council and two members of the planning commission. And the goal here is to take a look at all the regulations concerning our downtown and try to rationalize them, simplify them. We're dealing with heights, we're dealing about future planning, things of those natures. And the thing is those types of things, as Will sort of alluded to, just sort of making clear what the process is and making it easier for people to locate and expand in Davis. In terms of the other part of the question, given the fact that I have 20 seconds left, I'll just have to somehow try to sneak that in in my question number eight and nine and maybe my summing up. But yeah, the format, yeah, one minute's too short for some of these things, especially the next question coming up, number eight. All right, council member Ferriks. Yeah, so the city, we're not hiding from the fact that we have unfunded liabilities. The city has $120 million in unfunded pension costs, but we are paying those pension costs on a regular basis. It's like a mortgage you pay on a monthly basis. We are, as far as cost containment goes, this current city council in the past four years has done the following. We have employees paying more percentage of their own pension costs. We lowered a monthly cafeteria cash out health benefit from 1,500 down to $500 per month. That's a huge savings for the city. That was across the 400 city employees. We've also renegotiated all of our employee contracts as well. So there are a number of things that we've done. There are certainly more things that we can be doing and I think you're seeing, but a city council that has been committed to doing the right thing, financially making sure we have a solid bottom line for the city. In terms of some of these items, what we can do to encourage additional economic development and growth and business opportunities in the town. One example is like in the downtown, the very core of our downtown. Right now, if you build a building above two stories, you have to get a conditional use permit to go above two stories. That seems silly to me. We could raise that to three or four stories minimum as one example of ways to be more facilitating of businesses in our town. Will Arnold? So I'm gonna give our member of the audience, Rob White a shout out here. He is the former innovation director here at the city. He's currently with Sierra Energy, right? I said that right? Okay, good. I wanted to be that correct on that. He had the idea that we ought to have a drinking game for this forum, which was certain buzzwords that get said by certain candidates. Mine was diversify our revenue portfolio. To me, that is the key. Thank you, cheers to that. To me, that's the key because it's not just about increasing revenue for our city. Wow, that's important. But right now, our eggs are in some pretty small and very few baskets. Most of our tax revenue or a sizable majority chunk comes from auto sales. Certainly our biggest employer by leaps and bounds is the university. What we can do to diversify that will go a long, long way, not just to increasing the bottom line, but to insulating us when things go south like they did almost a decade ago. Okay, Matt. Before this forum started, Don Fout said to me out in the front, it'll be interesting to see whether or not the candidates answer the question. It basically says here, the last sentence, how will you ensure that needed funds stay within the city to support schools, parks, et cetera? One of the things is don't approve a CFD that gives away a million dollars of expendable income that could be spent at your businesses every year for 30 years. It was a $10 million giveaway, but it's a $30 million cost to the local businesses, to the local schools, and the like, don't make those kind of silly mistakes. Thank you. All right, Council Member Furricks, you'll lead off this next question. With the business growth that our community has enjoyed, a downtown parking crunch has been noticed and cited by many. If elected, what will you do to solve this growing problem? There are, yeah, there's definitely a need for additional supply in the downtown regard to parking, but I think there's also a need to do a better job of management of the parking as well. One example that we are concretely working on right now will be in this coming year's budget. The city owns a lot at the corner of Richards and Olive that is currently a de facto parking lot for downtown employees. If you go there right now, there's a fence around it with a little bit of a gate open. There are probably anywhere between 30 to 50 cars parked in that lot right now. We're not earning any money from it and it's not even an official city parking lot. Yet that's a place where we are going to this year pave that lot and use it potentially as a paid lot, but also to drive a little bit of revenue from it as well. But we actually, I think with the Brownman properties, having brought the Brindley properties in the next couple of years when they try to come to the city looking for a little bit of adjustment and potential development of some of those buildings, I think we will have an ability as well to work on some parking supply in the newly constructed sort of multi-use Brownman properties. Thank you, Will Arnold. As a downtown business owner, that rolls off the tongue. Look, long before we took over the store, I have advocated for more parking and adopting of the DDBA and the parking task force plan. Parking is an issue in downtown Davis. In fact, I suggest all of you take a look at the speech that I gave when I kicked off my campaign. It's called Just Reach Out Your Hand, but I started with how was parking out there? And of course, there were a lot of groans among the, I think it was approximately 1,000 people that were at that event, and parking is rough out there. But look, this is one of those good problems to have, okay? Because as I said that night, if that event was being held at Loudies, you would have been able to pull right up front and find a spot, okay? So having a lack of parking is a good thing, but we ought to address it adequately. What it means is people want to be here, and that is an incredibly good thing. Okay, Matt Williams. The key to solving the parking situation is to create free spaces, whether that's existing spaces or additional building of spaces. The cost of building a space is about $75,000 per space, and it's gonna probably take three years to design and do. What we need to do is to solve the problem now. Parking management is a key. Brett, which I support completely, has said, as the parking cast source did, that we need a concise area of meters in downtown. The problem with meters, while it can solve some of the problems immediately, is it pushes the free parking out to the edge of the meters. Meeting with Jennifer Anderson a couple weeks ago, one of the things that we're adding are cameras that can recognize license plates to make sure that we're able to enforce the areas that aren't metered, so that we have a holistic blended approach that addresses the problem throughout the downtown and throughout the neighborhood residential areas near the university. Council Member Lee. So it normally takes me about five to eight minutes to talk about my proposed, well, and also my proposed solutions and the parking task force solutions to the parking issue downtown. Let me first state by saying, I think the parking situation downtown is atrocious. There are many people I know who don't go downtown to shop or go to restaurants because they feel like it's gonna be just an annoyance just looking for a place to park. UC Davis had a senior class come into a study in about, on a Saturday morning, about 25% of the cars driving in downtown are actually just cars looking for a place to park. They're not on their way to or from somewhere, they're just circling. So to address that issue, that's gonna need a combination of some paid parking and additional free parking. And ultimately, a few years down the road, some additional capacity. I can tell you that if you meet me out to the boarders bookstore at nine o'clock in the morning, or sorry, Whole Foods, and you look, the lot is full and you'll watch as the people arrive and you watch what direction they go. They go towards campus, they're not going downtown to shop. And so we need to recognize that students are not stupid. On campus, it costs them $9 to park, whereas right now, parking downtown is free. And so they have a one hour class. As I say, the students aren't stupid, but I'm happy to elaborate when we have more time. Final question, and will Arnold, you'll kick this one off. With SB 876 in the legislature and the city of Davis Task Force on homelessness, many challenges have been brought up regarding homelessness in Davis. Given the information challenges and proposed solutions in this area, what are your views on homelessness in Davis and in what ways will you act on these views? So this is a particularly tough one for a city council candidate to answer for a few reasons. Number one, we're not alone. This is a problem facing nationally, internationally, statewide, regionally. So if there was a silver bullet answer to that, boy, a lot of folks would wanna know that answer. Also, of course, as we know, social service issues, including homelessness, and a lot of the services that are needed to combat homelessness are administered by the county, which is an arm of the state. And that really limits what a city council member or the city council as a whole or a city can do to address homelessness. So I'm encouraged by models that are out there, including the housing first models that have been implemented with varying degrees of thoroughness and success in various places. But to reiterate, this is a tough problem for a city council to address. Matt Williams. Everything that Will just said is true, but we can blame the state for our homeless challenges or we can take responsibility for them. The reality is, is that if we align our homeless programs and our affordable housing programs, we're going to be able to address both of them. Affordable housing was created in a time when you had redevelopment agency funds. It was in a time when we were building single family homes. That's not the case anymore. We're building mostly multifamily homes and we should be able to use our existing stock of housing to be able to address both affordability and homelessness. People who complain about Nishi being unaffordable aren't taking into consideration the fact that it's being built with new materials, new labor, new land costs. Of course, it's not going to be affordable, but we have a lot of housing inventory here in Davis that was built with old money, old materials, and that we can use to be able to address both affordability and homelessness. So every year in Davis, we do a homelessness survey. The rough numbers are about 100 people. It's an under report, but the city recently approved a 65 unit affordable housing project for the extremely low income and those extremely high risk of homelessness. That's an important piece. I think it's also not, it's very important that we not lose sight of the fact that we have a lot of seniors in the community and especially with much longer lifespans of people. We have a huge number of people who have lived in our community for many, many years who are going to struggle to find affordable places to live as they get older. And one of the interesting things, again, most of these answers require longer than one minute, the city built new harmony. And what's interesting about that is about a third of the people who live in new harmony, the city's affordable housing complex, have no connection to Davis or Yolo County whatsoever. Because of defective selection processes in terms of the city's affordable housing program, we are not prioritizing the current residents of Davis to have them live in these properties. And the city council's currently working on repairing that selection process. So this is a very challenging issue, and it's honest, yeah, I mean, you can't address the entire range of this issue in 60 seconds. We've done a couple of things, though. The city has committed money and also a location at fifth and D, right next to the fire station. It's called the New Pathways Project. We have a cottage that we own. It's right next to the fire station. There are currently six residents, formerly homeless individuals living in that house, with also wraparound social services and social worker care and working on mental health and also alcohol and drug counseling. The city put money into doing that. It's not enough, but we started. We just approved, as Brett said, the new Creekside Commons affordable housing complex. It will take about two years to build. It's 70 units of single bedroom housing with wraparound social services. And it is along Fifth Street out past the police station. It will be for folks who are currently homeless or at risk of homelessness. And that'll be a very big step in the right direction. Just a couple of weeks ago, we've had a homeless camp sort of developing on one of the North Davis green belts and some of the low underbrush. So I went out there with a bunch of the residents and we had city staff working on it, police as well as park staff, but working on that issue up there. It's a big issue, but we've got a lot more to do on it. Thank you. So one minute, I know it seems alarmingly short, but a main reason for it is to give our constituents a chance here to ask some questions that you may have. And believe it or not, we're actually a little behind, but we do have time for about three audience questions. So we will go ahead and have audience questions come up here because this is not a wireless mic. If you have an audience question, could you just raise your hand? I'm gonna go with the first three I see. We have one back here, two here. Oh gosh, thank you, three. Thanks for making that easy. I was afraid I was gonna have to be a little bit of a bad guy. Okay, so one. And then we have Greg. Everybody hear me? I recently received a mailer from the no on A folks. Would you take one of those arguments and comment on them? Well, I already commented on the affordability thing. You can't build affordable housing without with new materials and as affordable. So I think it's a specious argument. I also feel that the 1500 beds is going to, if we pull that out of the inventory of houses here with the same amount of demand, we're gonna see affordability go up all the way around the city for all of the current inventory. So I think it's again a specious argument that affordability is an issue. Those are the two that I would jump on. So, you know, Measure A and Nishi, I think reasonable people can vote yes and I think reasonable people can vote no. I think the important thing though is that the community be well informed of what the actual facts are. And what's disappointing about the no campaign is in spite of them knowing what the facts are, they continue to intentionally mislead. There's no better way to, there's no nice way of saying it. The city council did not give them a 10 million or 14 million dollar handout in terms of waiving some affordable housing requirement. This is untrue. The municipal code is there, it's been there since 2013 and it basically says for mixed use developments or stacked flat condos, there are no requirements for the big A affordable housing so that the housing project sort of funds. And so this is a thing that keeps being repeated. We're all at the farmer's market, we hear it over and over, the booth is right there and we're always, you know, we just keep trying to answer, we give them the link to the website on the city's website and that's the one that really, you know, Brian you asked about it, that's the one that jumps out to me. And if you wanna vote yes or you wanna vote no, that's fine but I'm just really disappointed with them really trying to mislead people about that aspect. I will, I'll take on one of the items on Nishi. So I, firstly, I support the Measure A, I would respectfully suggest that folks both educate themselves about it but also consider voting yes, I think it will help benefit the city's fiscal bottom line but also add some needed residential units in this community as well as some much needed R&D space. I wanna make sure I talk about one specific issue, the traffic that people are very worried about. Of course everyone's worried about that but Nishi does not go forward. We're getting feedback up here, so Nishi does not go forward until two specific pieces of infrastructure are actually put in place. One is the totally re-engineered, redesigned Richards Boulevard interchange out by Interstate 80 and then also a tunnel, a pedestrian bike and vehicle tunnel that will go through the under, from the Nishi to the university. One of the things that's great about this new tunnel is that literally the double-decker buses will actually be able to go under this new tunnel and currently double-decker buses, unit trans buses can't even fit under the original Richards tunnel. So you have buses literally going side by side or one after another into South Davis, we'll be able to increase that capacity and I wanna just say that all of these sort of arguments that are being put out there with regard to traffic and the fear that's associated with it, I think are unfounded. So I concur with what's been said by my fellow candidates but I'm gonna pick on another one. There's an argument being made by the opponents of Measure A that somehow if you build housing near a freeway that you are endangering the lives of those who may live there. That ought to be news to the folks who live, say, in old East Davis or on Brentwood or on Notre Dame or Brown or Drake or Cape Cod or a whole lot of places in town let along a whole lot of places in our state or our world. That is a big, big statement that they're making that if you live within, say, 1,000 feet of a freeway that your house actually isn't worth what you think it is. So if you're buying into that argument and you live somewhat close to a freeway, you better be willing to take a real hit on your home's value. That argument to me is a bridge way, way too far. Councilmember Lee, you'll answer first for Greg's. Thank you all for being here and thank you for coming to a, my comments are might be more than a minute before I get to my question, but I have the mic now and I'm not letting it go. But I think my, first of all, thank you for coming to an active business. This has been, obviously, it's challenging to walk into any business environment. This is a factory and you guys are here tonight and there's been compressors going off. There's been, you know, they're trying to like make a living and earn some money with a bar in the back. Yeah, people are having a good time, but the main point is this is what's happening in Davis on a daily basis. People are trying to earn a living, make a living, conduct a good business. And I think the citizens of Davis, the students of Davis, the whole spectrum of everybody that we interact with on a daily basis are the lifeblood of this community, but the businesses, the places to go, Central Park, those are the heart of Davis, right? I mean, nobody would come downtown if the businesses weren't there. Nobody would come to Central Park if the park wasn't there. Nobody, if the farmers market, those type of things are the heart of Davis. And I think it's often overlooked. The blood only gets pumped around because of the heart, right? And so my question is, I feel that we're in California which has its own intrinsic difficulties to do business, but then we're in this regional concept, statewide concept. There's businesses that are here in Davis that can go other places. There's businesses in Davis that are here and have other satellite operations or other business entities that are other places in the region. And it seems to be that it's far more, it's just, there's just less, not community resistance, but city resistance to those people operating in other towns that are in our general one hour kind of region than in Davis. And I feel that we want to build or at least we want to support technology parks, business development, economic development, all of these things, but how are we gonna accomplish that when our image is it's far more difficult. You're swimming upstream if you're gonna do business in Davis. What are your responses to that? Could you repeat the question? Well, I have another homeless question, but I'm not gonna go there, but if you'd like me to. Yeah, so no, the question is a good one and I appreciate you setting the context. You know, I think what really, I mentioned it before, in some small towns there's kind of this old boy network, friend of a friend or special deals, that type of thing. And the reality is we're a big enough, sturdy enough city that the answer I think to your question is transparency, transparent open processes and the elimination of unnecessary sort of bureaucratic red tape. In addition, well, what that helps is that the whole commute, I mean, we just talked about a second with Measure A, right? I have so many people all freaked out, they wanna vote no because they hear all these horrible things. With a more transparent open system, people better understand what goes on here. When I talk to people about the importance of sales tax revenue and I tell them that the card dealerships are kind of the very important piece of what makes Davis Davis. They're paying for the parks, they're paying for all these things. They're like, wow, I never knew that, really? And that type of information helps people understand that reasonable, thoughtful growth, thoughtful business investment is good for the community. But that piece is missing a little bit. Right now, you guys have a good strong set of knowledge around some things. That information isn't disseminated as widely as it should be. So the overlong answer is increased transparency and more streamlined processes. So thanks very much, Greg, for the context but also for the question. I think a couple things. I mean, this city council, this current city council has been working hard to change the reputation of Davis. It took a while for the city's reputation to sort of get as bad as it did a few years ago, okay? You had a city, I mean, some of us refer to this sort of period as the lost decade, right? There was a decade where the city council literally did this pretty much at every meeting. We had a council member being taken out on a stretcher. It's on YouTube. I mean, you could go take a look at the video yourself. That is not the city council and we have been working together. We agree to disagree on occasion, certainly, but we work together. We've worked very diligently to change our reputation in the region and it's paying dividends. We have businesses we want to be here in Davis. The Sacramento area council governments is very engaged with us now and throughout the region. The SAC Metro Chamber, a bunch of us participate in the annual cap-to-cap trip. All of these types of things are indicators that Davis has been working on rebuilding its reputation in the region. Greg mentioned this issue of this downtown sort of being the heart of the community that pumps the blood. Well, Davis is also the brains of the region, particularly due to the university and the intellectual capital that's here at the university. So we need to continue to capitalize on that as well. So this is a chamber of commerce and you make a map of Davis and it says some things, maybe you get to advertise in it. A lot of other chambers do something similar, right? City of Roseville makes a map of its city that the chamber hands out. The city of Roseville map says, home of UC Davis. Let that sink in for a minute. Yeah. We, Davis, California are the home of UC Davis. We need to embrace that. We need to shout that from the rooftops. Look, I'm gonna give another plug to my speech, check it out on YouTube, just reach out your hand. People want to invest here. They want to live here, they wanna learn here, they wanna study here, they wanna raise a family here. And that is a very good thing. And the city ought to embrace that. Like I said, we drive a very hard bargain if you wanna do those things. But still, we need to recognize that those are not just the sum of their challenges that they create for our community, but they are the entirety of the opportunities that they create for our community. Every one of you runs a business. And you know that that business, the income statement is a combination of revenues and costs and it produces the bottom line. Bottom line is probably the most important. Brett in his comment about increased transparency was focusing on the costs. Collegiality on the council, I'm not sure what that would contribute to the income statement. I do agree that Davis is the brains of the region and it gets back to my answer to question number four. If we're gonna create value, if we're going to contribute to the revenues of the region, we're gonna need the city, the innovation center developers and the people who are involved in innovation in the core and UCD to work together to build rock solid documentation of clear examples of evidence of how we are better than everybody else. We are not, Rosville, we are Davis. We are better than everybody else. We need to capitalize on that. We need to leverage it. You'll come up and ask our last question of the night here and Lucas will kick that off. So I have about a 10 minutes soliloquy before I get to a question. I think they're gonna, is there? It's actually a two piece question. One, some news out there, some whispers are that some of you don't support Measure A in June. So part A, I'd like you to answer that yes, you support Measure A and that you do support it for the June ballot. Number two, obviously as an economic development question is name one thing that you plan to do in your first year in office that would be a support to business and specifically the Chamber of Commerce. So I, oh sorry. You're lucky, you get to go last, you get to go last. I'm gonna figure out what they say and then triangulate my answer to maximize the crowd appeal. Well, unequivocally I support Measure A. I've taken a lot of heat for that. I'm taking a lot of heat for that around town. I'm talking about it at campaign events I attend. I'm not sure that all the council candidates do unequivocally support Measure A either in June or November. But it'll be interesting to hear the responses. It's vital for the future of the city. In terms of first year, sort of next year if that happens, I think that we need to, one of the items I would really like to see, sort of it's two things. I'd like to see a full inventory of all of the existing properties, internal properties in town here that we still have that are suitable for additional sort of business development. There are a variety of, and I don't know that the city has a full sort of comprehension of what those are. But also, one of the things I've been talking about in a number of the different forums and such is that the Frontier Fertilizer Superfund site that's out here on Second Street, we need to get that, figure out how to finish getting that cleaned up so it can be used for economic development activity. It is literally just a wasted opportunity sitting there currently next to the Moriseki factory. So I really want to put emphasis on that. I'm on record and I'm very proud of my support of Measure A. I think this is a critically important project for our community. It's called the Nishi Gateway and that second word is very important because that will be the best foot forward for our community. It was identified by our Innovation Park Task Force as the best place for the small incubator space that needs to be close to downtown, close to where folks already live and of course, close to UC Davis. It's gonna invest a lot in our infrastructure in town, in particular, the needed changes that are needed whether or not Nishi passes to change this freeway on-ramp, off-ramp situation on Richards. Measure A is our best opportunity to address this existing need in our community. So I'm proud of my support. All of that said, my signs look for them. They're Carolina blue with a water tower on top and they share a lot of lines with some, share a lot of lawns that is with some no on A signs. That's okay. We're gonna be open-minded. We're not gonna take our ball and go home no matter what happens in June. But that said, I am on record and proud to restate it here that I support Measure A. I'm clearly the person who has the nuanced answer. I 100% support Measure A. I think I've been very clear as to why the arguments that Noah's putting out are wrong. I would not have put Measure A on the June ballot. I wouldn't have put it on for a couple reasons. One is, so far the university has agreed to put up $0 toward the underpass. That underpass is equally valuable to them. I would have said that we don't need to rush because the commitments that the developers of Nishi have done to say we will not build on site until the underpass is completed and the construction is going on the I-80 interchange. That gave us three years to be able to hammer out a deal in which UC Davis does its fair share. We were not in a rush. I would have put it off. I respect the decision of the council and I support Measure A 100%. If I'm going to do anything, sorry for the red, if I'm going to do anything to contribute to the community and to all of you businesses out here, it is to leverage the core competencies of the universities, the things that make this city different so that we can show that we have more value than any place else and translate that value into economic growth for all of us. So I support Measure A. I think overall it'll be a net benefit to the community. Been pretty clear about my support. I voted to put it on the ballot and my campaign coffees. I talk about all the reasons why I support it. As far as the other piece, you know, one of the things Lucas didn't mention is the council recently approved and Rochelle's out in the crowd, community choice energy. So I'm hoping that Davis has lower priced energy. So that's an attractive thing for new businesses and also existing businesses. And as I mentioned before, working on the possibility of creating a fiber optic network so that people have fast connectivity and lower priced connectivity. So, you know, people ask me about the number of Thai restaurants and frozen yogurt places. I'm kind of a believer that, hey, if you think you can make a go at Thai food, go for it. The fact that there's 10 here already and you want to be number 11, that's up to you. I think the city's job is to provide the basic infrastructure for you to have a good chance for success. And that would be the internet, the roads, the parking, and hopefully not too onerous hoops to jump through to go through the paperwork and the zoning changes. Well, first I want to thank all of our candidates for being here tonight. You certainly have, I'm sure, many conflicting engagements. You have undoubtedly three places to be and we really appreciate that you chose to be here. So thank you. Thank you again to the Davis Chamber of Commerce PAC and the Davis Chamber of Commerce staff and board for putting on such a wonderful event. And I'm sure that this is a great place to mingle. So if there's additional things that you would like to talk about with the candidates, this would be a great time to do it. And with that said, I will not hold things up any longer. Thank you for coming and we'll see you around.