 Well, I want to say welcome to you. My name is Leslie Hunter and thank you for coming to Civ Energy's Davis City Council Candidate Forum. And I really want to thank the candidates for participating with our online website and for being here today. After the forum, we are going to have a reception catered by Three Ladies' Cafe. And then you'll have an opportunity to visit each candidate's campaign table. And now I would like to introduce Bob Fung. So thanks to Leslie. She's the one who organized the forum and she did a great job, I think. And thanks to all of you for coming out on a Sunday afternoon. We're all very energetic here in Davis about our politics and I think this shows that. I want to thank the candidates for coming out and for their energy and their participation in the civic process. And I want to thank Davis Community Church for allowing us to use this facility. My wife and I have been members here for 30 years. We remember when this was built and we've been here many, many times for many different things, fundraisers, church events, and it's just a great, great facility. I just want to say a few things about Civ Energy. We're a relatively new organization and we're it's a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization. It's an experiment in democracy to try to get voters the information they need to make a good voting decision as quickly as possible. You know that nationally that there's a lot of money going into campaigns which is sort of messing with voters' minds and we're trying to get voters straight information directly from the candidates. And so for this election period, for this election cycle, Leslie and I are working together to try to work on putting the online candidate forum that we have at the Civ Energy website together with traditional events like this candidate forum. And we want, we know that making a decision is more than just hearing the candidates talk about issues. We want you to meet with the candidates, shake their hand, hear them talk with you about the things that are important to you. So we have nine candidates for two spots. So we had to think pretty creatively about how this forum would be designed because there's not that much time with nine candidates. We have a program. We printed out a number of copies which we're out of now. But if you go to the Civ Energy website to the first entry which is the description of the event, there's a link there on that page which leads you right to the program and you could just download it in PDF format or whatever you want to do and look at it after the forum. In that program, there are seven yes or no short answer questions about that all the candidates have answered. We're going to be asking the candidates to answer, give an opening statement and closing statement and three, we're going to ask them three questions which are designed for you to hear how they think. So that's our design for the forum. Ann Evans is going to be the moderator for this forum. She's the former mayor of Davis and she was a City Council member for two terms. She recently wrote a revised version of the Davis Farmers Market Cookbook and two of the things being served today are from recipes from her cookbook. So thank you Ann for being the moderator today. I just want to say hi to everybody. I'll have my back to you most of the time because I'm asking the questions of the candidates but welcome. Thank you for your interest in Davis and its civic life. Okay, are we ready? Yeah. So good afternoon. There will be five rounds of questions. The first and last rounds you will have one minute to respond and the second, third and fourth rounds you will have two minutes. Mark Eggleston here will be timing and will be showing you your remaining time. Green with half the time to go, yellow 15 seconds to go and red at five seconds. Any questions? So please respect all of our time and when you're looking at the red. Okay, and names are drawn out of a hat of how we start first and each of you will be rotating along. So we're going to start with Mary Jo Bryan. The first question, one minute, is to provide an opening statement. My name is Mary Jo Bryan and I have 44 years of experience working and volunteering in Yolo County and in Davis. I've served as an executive director of a non-local nonprofit agency and worked in local government as an aide to former supervisor Helen Thompson. I was past president and member of the League of Women Voters studying governmental issues in implementing solutions. I was program coordinator for the Yolo County Department alcohol and drug programs and most recently I advocated for single story housing for seniors and persons with disabilities and fought to the better end to try to save the family's first campus for the citizens of Davis. As a retiree, I am able to devote full time to the Davis City Council and you. Thank you. Dan Carson. My name is Dan Carson and I'm running for city council to preserve the quality of life and the core values of sustainability, education and family we share as Davis residents. I'm prepared to do this job today. After a career as an investigative reporter covering state and local government, I went back to UC Davis and got my MBA. I then worked for 17 years as a fiscal and policy analyst for the state legislature. As deputy I was responsible for health care, social services, criminal justice, transportation, energy and environmental policy and in retirement I'm your chair of the finance and budget commission. My focus as if you elect me is to resolve an eight million dollar year fiscal gap that could ruin our roads and our parks and I want to focus on creating a new and better relationship with UC Davis so we can work together to deal with housing, traffic and parking problems. Thank you Dan. Hundreds of people have endorsed me. Thank you very much. Linda. Linda Dios. Hello there. Hello there. My name is Linda Dios. I'm a consumer protection attorney and a small business owner. I have 30 plus years of public service and I currently serve on the Davis personnel board as well as the yellow county health council. This service along with my 20 years of negotiating contracts, mediating complex settlements and managing budgets gives me the experience to serve and lead this community. My focus is going to be on building entry level housing for our families, our seniors and our students, fixing our crumbling roads, bike paths and sidewalks, diversifying our revenue sources by encouraging economic development. Solutions to these issues require independence, the strength to say no to proposals that are not in the best interest of our whole community and to say yes to those that do. Thank you Linda. Eric Goods. Good afternoon everybody. My name is Eric Goods and I want to thank you all for taking your time to be here with us this evening. I'm writing for Davis City Council very simply because I feel that it should be just a little bit easier for folks in my generation and all generations in Davis to be able to access, live and breathe the Davis dream that we all know and love. There's a reason why every single one of us came here to Davis, settled in Davis and wanted to make our homes in Davis. But right now, we have so many of us, thousands of us, that are not able to access the Davis dream. Whether it's affordability in our housing, whether it's lack of accessibility with our job market, economic development or lack of community resources, our town is struggling and there are many that are unable to attain the Davis dream. So my focus as your public servant on the Davis City Council is to ensure that each and every one of us has access to the Davis dream and can fulfill our vision of wanting to be part of this community for now and ever. Thank you. Larry Gunther. Hi, I'm Larry Gunther. Thanks to everyone for coming out for Leslie and Bob and for all the candidates for stepping up. What I'm going to bring to the Davis City Council if elected is a strong independent voice for neighborhoods and for community groups in the decision making process. As a small business owner, what I do is listen to my clients and problem solve within their budget. Helping my clients realize their vision while doing this, that's what I do. I want to listen to our commissions and our community groups, increasing transparency, accountability and trust, our cornerstones of what I want to achieve. Fortunately, in Davis, the heart of our process is community-based commissions with intelligent problem-solving people. I want to respect the recommendations of those commissions and our community groups and all the stakeholders involved. And this is what I do every day. Thank you, Larry. Okay, thought he said five. Thank you for your kindness there. Gloria Partida. All right, I want to thank everybody for coming out today and thanks to Energy. I'm Gloria Partida and I've lived in Davis since 1989. I've been an activist since my own high school, walked out in a decade that I'm not going to disclose. I'm running for Davis City Council because I'm committed to building community. I believe communities belong to the people that live in them. And the people that live in Davis are diverse. We are young, we're old, or multicultural, and our neighborhoods are extremely unique. The uniqueness of Davis can only be preserved by remaining fiscally solvent, economically strong, and by providing housing for all. And I am committed to working hard to bring out the best in Davis. Thank you, Gloria. Luis Rios. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Luis Rios. It's great to be here today with all of you. This is an exciting time here in Davis. I'm here with my two children and my wife. I'm here with my campaign team, UC Davis College students, who have been working very hard and support me as I run for office. I was born in Davis and grew up in Yule County. I come from a working class labor household. I learned from my father the value of hard work, ethics, friendships, and integrity. He also taught me about Cesar Chavez. And I have a quote from Cesar Chavez. We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community. Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others for their sakes and our own. And that's why I'm running for Davis City Council. Thank you, Luis. Mark West. Good afternoon, I'm Mark West. I came to Davis in 1959 when my parents brought me home from the hospital. I have a very long view of what's going on in Davis and I recognize the challenges that we face today. Some of them have been in place for a long time. I'm running a city council because I want to directly address those challenges instead of pushing them off for other generations. So the two that I think I'm going to focus on are our fiscal challenge and our housing shortage. Fiscal challenge I want to address through economic development, increasing opportunity for everybody to improve their quality of life. And that housing challenge I want to address primarily through multifamily high density housing because that's the shortage that we have in town. 50% of our community are renters and we have an absolute shortage of apartments available for them to live in. Those are the two things that I want to address. And I thank you all for being here. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Ezra Beeman. Thank you. My name is Ezra Beeman. I was born and raised in the area, fifth generation and I've returned to Davis to raise my children here. I moved out of the area to get my degree in philosophy and economics from Claremont McKenna. And then I moved overseas for my professional career living in Paris and Sydney, Australia where I worked for the utility there. I returned to Davis with my three children as they approached school age because I really loved growing up in this community and I wanted my children to grow up in this community as well. I'm running today because I want to be an advocate and support the progressive ideals and thinking that I think have made this a truly remarkable community. I think my, the values I share with this community having grown up there, my educational qualifications which also include a master's in finance and my experience founding two businesses and working for a large organization will help me make a difference on the council. Thank you. Thank you, Ezra. Okay, this is the second question and the candidates did receive this question in advance. The final two, they did not. Okay, and could the candidates please speak directly into the microphone because we're doing a recording of this. I can be sure that you're looking over at Mark from time to time with the red, green and yellow. Okay, you will have two minutes to answer this question and we will be beginning with Linda Dios. Economic development is key to the future of Davis being able to provide community services to its population. Sacramento has declared itself the farm to fork capital of America and within that context of farm to fork capital of America Woodland has chosen to create food front on its main street and invest in infrastructure related to attracting food processors. Winters has become known for its innovative restaurants and redevelop the downtown to feature them. West Sacramento is attracting boob hubs and is investing in a vision of becoming a global food hub and UC Davis is a powerhouse of knowledge on food and agriculture. What are your thoughts for ways in which the city of Davis can develop a unique food identity which contributes both culturally and economically to the city? And we'll begin with Linda. Thank you. This is close enough. Okay, a couple of things I think we need to focus on and one of them is to the point of building community downtown so that it's a downtown area that I wanna come to that attracts me and attracts others to eat downtown, to play downtown, to drink coffee downtown, drink wine downtown. That's lacking now. Think of it when we want to go out to dinner, want to go and have a special birthday dinner anniversary dinner, more often than not I'm driving across that causeway to Sacramento. I'm going up to winners. I'm going to other places because we don't have what all of us can have downtown here in that it's wonderful that we have so many ethnic restaurants, so many cafes, so many things that are oriented to going in fast, picking up the food and leaving. What we don't have are sit-down restaurants. I would like to encourage more of that downtown. Think of that. Why do we go to Europe? Why do we go to other places? We love the idea of the piazas, of the small community, of being a place where we can walk from here to there. I want to foster that downtown. Wider sidewalks, more pedestrian friendly. Think of the alleys that we have. Think of, my gosh, what's the big one? Tim Spencer Alley that's going through a renovation right now. I'm envisioning bistros there. I'm envisioning small tables sitting out with trees, having a canopy going over, be it the sails or the lights, thinking of that alley in San Francisco that attracts folks to it. Secondly, I want to be looking at building our relationship with UC Davis. That was brought up. It is the number one in agriculture. Number one in plant sciences and vet sciences. We have the Robert Mondavi Institute for wine and food science. Let's bring their tasting room of olive oil, honey, wines downtown. Let's bring folks here. Let's see more of that cooperation between UC and the city. Thank you, Linda. Eric. Thank you so much for this question. So one of the biggest issues with why we are seeing a significant barrier and a significant impediment for us being able to foster more of our culinary and creative scene downtown is very simply because the young professionals in our community and the creative class in our community are simply not able to afford to live in Davis. They are moving to West Sacramento and starting their bistros there. They're moving to Woodland to start their work there. They're going to Winters. They're going to Sacramento. They're going to the Bay. I can't tell you how many hundreds and thousands of my friends have moved out of this community and are not coming back. And these are the kinds of folks that we need to be able to retain in Davis. We need to be able to keep them employed and keep them working within our communities. So first and foremost, what we need to do is we need to be able to find ways to get our young professionals in our creative class plugged back into our communities. And this is something that I hear a lot talking to some of the downtown restaurants and I'm out canvassing walking doors is that they're feeling the pinch, that they're feeling that particular issue with their workers and folks that are trying to fill their restaurants that are having to commute out of Davis. They're having to commute from Sacramento, from the Bay even, to come to Davis, right? And that's putting a strain on parking. It's putting a strain on workers' rights and wage laws. It's putting a strain on our customer base. We're not bringing enough dollars downtown and all of that is affecting our ability to be the next food to four capital and to compete with the greater region in that regard. So I think first and foremost, we need to work on the people and we need to make sure that our creative class and our working class is able to survive and thrive in Davis. Thank you, Eric. Larry. Hi, so the question, yeah, it ended with the University of California, Davis and we've got that right here. They've got the food thing all wrapped up regionally and coordinating with them and expanding on what we already have, the advantages we already have. It's been done. So as one of my major advisors used to say, if it did happen, it can happen. We have a Master Brewer program that started at the university with Charles Bamforth and cooperating with Suedwork. Doing more of that, we've got one in a university with a town full of creative people. We've got a farmers market that is literally world famous tabling at the farmers market you talk or just walking around. You talk to people who are coming from the Midwest, East Coast, they're visiting from out of the country and they're coming to the farmers market. So we've already got a lot of the infrastructure that we need to do this. The thing that I think that we can focus on that again, Davis has in excess almost that the other cities mentioned don't have is our international configuration, our international populace. We've got the university, we've got people who come to Davis for a variety of reasons and stay for kind of one reason. It's a really great place to live. So capitalizing on that, capitalizing on the creativity, the problem solving and the international aspect of the people who come here can go a long way toward cooperating with the university, with the city, city businesses with people. I mean, we've got a lot of university or a lot of restaurant businesses that could take a menu from an individual and try it out. Thank you, Larry. Gloria. Okay, so recently I was at work and we were having a conversation because we discovered that there is a bike bus and the advertisement for the bike bus was, take this bike bus with your friends and do wine tasting. And we thought, where would you go? Because I can't think of too many places that are sort of geared towards wine tasting. And I think that the problem that we have is that we don't have a cohesiveness. So we have a lot of great places to eat. As people have said here, we don't have too many places where they will come and take your menu or take your order and you can sit down and have sort of a relaxed place to have dinner. There are a lot of older people who feel that the restaurants are sort of geared towards the younger people in town. And business people are smart. They know that that is a large demographic but there is other opportunity that I think we are missing. And while I think that a great deal of the effort should be downtown because we wanna continue the vibrancy we have there, there are other places that people live in Davis and there are other centers that we have and there's West Davis or South Davis. There are places that people can get too close to their neighborhoods and I think that we miss the opportunity to sort of invest in those spaces where people can go. And the thing with the bike bus is an excellent way for us to meld two of the things that we have an identity with. We have an identity with food because of the Mondavi Institute, Food Institute and also because we have the farmers market. We are also known for our bikes and so Sacramento has a bike crawl. I think we can do that here as well. We have to meld, we have to coalesce, we have to sort of be more coordinated in our efforts. We can pair our food with our arts. Thank you Gloria, Luis. The Davis downtown area has a lot of potential. I remember last summer we celebrated my son's birthday party in downtown with a four or five of his friends, families. And so we went to Woodstocks and afterwards we went to Ice Cream and then we waited for a movie. It was called Captain Underpants I think. So that was good. So that was my first, one of my first encounters with downtown more closely besides watermelon music moving to West Davis, but there's empty storefronts, there's more, there's so much potential in downtown Davis. I could definitely see the East Street Plaza being resurfaced. It's like the heart of Davis really having more lawn, trees, more bringing in businesses, supporting local businesses. I see the Varsity Theater, the old City Hall building. Those can be used as anchors to build and develop from there. I had the opportunity to meet the Chancellor Gary May and his administration. We definitely need to work on partnerships and building on relationships. It starts from there. That's how you get things done. During my freshman year, I lived in Tercero, which is right across from the cows. And so I thought of, when Bob sent us this question about, let's see, some food identity. So I thought of the Davis Organic Shake or the Aggie Organic Smoothie or the Smoothie and Ag and there's acronyms that go along with those, DOS, AOS, S-A. So we can definitely market a product mutually in partnership to begin with. It's a lot of potential. Thank you. Thank you, Louise. Mark. Excuse me. Davis already has a pretty vibrant downtown. If you walk around down there, there's a lot of things going on. The challenge that we have is that there's not a lot of good restaurants that we can sit down and have a fine meal at. And the primary reason for that is because the community doesn't have enough people who appreciate fine restaurants to go out and support those places. So they end up, we have one or two come in, they have survived for a few years and then they close down. We need to be, as a community, more supportive of our downtown food environment. We also need to bring more people living downtown so that they can walk downstairs or next door to the restaurant rather than having to drive in from the outskirts and try to find a place to park and all the other challenges. So I think we need to take an example from our neighbors who work that they're doing. Winters talked about bringing in new restaurants or creating new restaurants and redeveloping and we need to do the same thing. But our redevelopment, because we're a larger city and we have different challenges, needs to be mixed use construction with apartments over the top of commercial throughout our downtown so that we have people living downtown and being a part of that community. And if we do that, we'll grow the food entity as well. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Ezra. So business development is what I do. Oh, sorry. Business development is what I do professionally. I help businesses identify growth opportunities, position themselves and establish plans to move into that space and operate successfully. And so I would tackle this question by first of all, like any good marketer, understanding what the nature of demand is. What do people want to eat? Then I would look at where is the competition positioning and that helps identify what are the gaps in the market? The next thing you need to think about is what is our strategic or competitive advantage? Some of it was already spoken of, we have UCD. We're also a very sustainable agriculture focused community. So that brings to mind things like a focus on organic food or a focus on things like wine. Just anecdotally, when I was in Australia and I said I came from Davis, they said, where is that? And I said, well, it's where we educated all your best wine makers. I think the role for the city though is similar to a country and developing their strategic industries. And that's where the city could look to remove the barriers for businesses to establish themselves and to also promote on a common basis the uniquely Davis food offerings. I would say though, Davis has got some phenomenal food right now. I mean, I love going to Poké. I love going to Dos Coyotes. I love going to chickpeas for example, and we go to fine dining around Davis all the time. And when I'm overseas, I miss Davis. It's one of the few places I can actually eat close to a vegan diet. And I can't do that in Sydney or Paris or other places. Thank you. Thank you, Ezra. Mary Jo. My thoughts regarding this question comes from a discussion with a USC Davis extension, a cooperative extension professor emeritus. He is interested in telling the history of the many different cultural communities that have made California agriculture what it is today. He wants to bring these stories to the university community. I wanna share my thoughts on how to use his ideas to bring the stories to Davis agricultural heritage into the city of Davis. There are some amazing panels at Turlock's Rest Stop on Highway 99 that depict agricultural workers. Using this idea for telling a story, we discuss the construction of large historical signs or panels to capture the historic and contributions of many cultural communities that have been major players in the development of our agricultural system. He would have the panels placed on permanent basis throughout the UC Davis campus. And I thought this project could extend into the downtown. And I thought this could extend into downtown throughout our city and be viewed not only by students and faculty, but also by the citizens of Davis and out of town visitors, revealing the agriculture and cultural history of Davis. The city and the university could collaborate to become a destination point by foretelling these stories. In order to contribute to the economic growth of our city, the Chamber of Commerce could enlist local restaurants to develop menu items that reflect the cultural and ethnic communities and develop a unique foods identity to go along with the stories of California and Davis agriculture. The Chamber could also work with the farmer's market, Friday's Artabout, the Pence Gallery, and the artery to feature and incorporate such attractions as cooking demonstrations and displays and entertainment. Of course, this is a concept and not a reality, but the cultural heritage of California and Davis agriculture could be a means of linking and benefiting our university and our city together. Thank you. Thank you, Mary Jo. Dan. I get to bat clean up today. We've got a lot of innovation in food to be proud of in the city of Davis. Our farmer's market and our food co-op blaze to trail that many other communities are still following. The start of work on a new plan for downtown Davis, I believe provides a great opportunity for us to both improve our economy and provide better and more interesting food choices for Davis residents and visitors. Both the farmer's market and the food co-op are both within the boundaries of the downtown planning area. Both draw a large number of out-of-town visitors to Davis. So we could think about what steps we as a city could take to have them linger a bit, hang around after the morning hours, for example, of the farmer's market, and therefore put more cash in our coffers. So how exactly could we do this? We've got some real experts from the farmer's market, the Visitors Bureau, UC Davis and the co-op who could help figure this out, but I've got two ideas. One is integrating a cafe or a restaurant into the third and B building, perhaps in partnership with the Bicycle Hall of Fame. Now that the states said we get to keep the building, I think it's time to explore the option of creating a farm to fork restaurant there. I'm also intrigued by the upper crust bakery move into the Radio Shack storefront over near the co-op. It strikes me that this could be the start of a foodie community. We could encourage other businesses to spin off their operations into other locations in the city or downtown. And one last idea, which is after we finish it with our downtown plan, we're gonna go to work on a general plan. Some cities in California have started to adopt health community elements to their general plans. They could talk about such things as physical activity to prevent obesity, but could also deal with things like encouraging more community gardens and more healthful eating. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, all of you. And now we'll move on to two questions that the candidates have not received. The third question is also two minutes and we will begin with Larry Gunther. Okay, share an instance of city decision-making process that you are familiar with and your evaluation of the effectiveness of that process. And I'll read that one more time. Okay. Share an instance of a city decision-making process that you are familiar with and your evaluation of the effectiveness of that process. There have been a lot of decisions made in the city since I've been here. One of the recent ones, I guess, that comes to mind, we're limited to one. Okay. I think a good process that came up recently was in fact the Lincoln 40 project. Whether or not it's a project you like or don't like or voted for or didn't vote for or thought in favor of. I think the commissions and their input were well heard. I think also the community input was listened to and was heard. But this took a huge step from the applicant and the applicant had to engage. They had to want to hear the input and they had to want to incorporate that input into the final project. So a collaborative community-based project is what I like to see. And I think they did a good job. And rewarding the good actors, not rewarding the bad actors, is a big part of what we can do going forward. So yeah, that's what I like to see. I like to see community input and I like to see that community input acted on. I like to see the citizen commissions, the community commissions have their say and have that say incorporated into the final project. So I think relatively speaking, that was a good project. Thanks. Great, thank you, Luria. That's hard to go first. Okay, Gloria. Can you read that question one more time? No? Okay, I will. Sure. Share an instance of a city decision-making process that you're familiar with and your evaluation of the effectiveness of that process. Okay, so the evaluation of that effectiveness. I think that what Larry said about having community input is really important in any policy that the city puts forward. I think that the community should be reflected in any decision-making that we do. The one that comes to mind for me is the parcel tax decision. Tax decisions are difficult and they're difficult for any community. Nobody likes to pay taxes. Everybody loves the things that come from them. But I think that in asking for consultation on the amount that the tax needed to be and also thinking down the road. So I think it's really important that any decision that we make take into account how far that decision is going to go and that the decisions we make today are not gonna be put on the generations that are gonna come afterwards. And so I think that the effective, well, we'll find out if people vote on these taxes that are put forward. But I do think that the process there was good. I think that they thought carefully about whether or not they were gonna pass one or two taxes. And again, I think that that decision was really difficult and those types of decisions are unpopular and it's important for the city council to be brave going forward and making those decisions. Great, thank you, Gloria. Luis. My issue is the issue of homelessness. You know, last year my son who's a Boy Scout, troop 139, he wrote an article on homelessness as one of his civil engagement requirements. He interviewed Will Arnold, council member and the article was published in the Davis Democratic Club. And so we had at home a lot of discussions about homelessness and a lot of questions about why is somebody with a sign in front of a supermarket asking for money or food or whatnot. So I think as parents, I'm very careful how to carry out a conversation. And here in Davis, we're very compassionate, we're caring people. And when I drive on I-80 and I see a tent along the tracks in I-80 or people sleeping on the street in our downtown area. So I think city council needs to be more intentional, more proactive, and as far as city decision making goes, we need to be better on serving people who sleep on the street really, no matter what their issues are, medical treatments, food, shelter. We need, the Davis community needs to really get together on this and have public support so that council members can move forward on this issue. And that's what I like to see, be more proactive, more intentional on helping our folks who don't have much. Thank you. Thank you, Louise, Mark. The process that I wanna talk about is how we create new businesses in town. And the one I wanna focus on is the discussions on the new hotels that were over the past couple of years and specifically on the Hyatt House Hotel. The issues that I saw here was a process created by the city council and the city staff that was attempting to pick winners and losers. Rather than evaluating a project for its appropriateness for the site, they were comparing different projects to see which one was better and also trying to protect existing properties. We need to move away from this protectionist mindset in picking winners and losers and instead just allow businesses to develop. Bring new businesses in. Hotels, we need more of them in this town. We are losing revenue on a daily basis because we don't have them. The university is this massive generator of desire for hotels and if we don't have the space, we may have to put people all around the region instead of in town and we lose the tax money. In the case of Hyatt House, it was a challenging position because although it was a commercial property, zone for commercial property, it was a different kind of business that was proposed to go into the site. That said, the developers were very good at trying to get engagement with the community. They're immediate neighbors and the neighbors for the most part refused to engage. That's an obstructionist attitude that is to prevent projects rather than to be involved in discussing the projects. And those were particular developers who were very good and a history of having, of responding to their engagement. So I want the city to be better and quicker at making decisions. Two years to make a hotel decision is far too long. We need to help businesses start so that we can have more opportunity for our residents. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Ezra. So the decision I want to talk about is the city's decision to join together with Yolo County and Woodland to launch a community choice aggregation energy business known as Valley Clean Energy. Why I think this was an effective and appropriate city decision making process is that one of the first things that was done was to get together a group of experts of which Davis is inordinately blessed and are some of the people I think are exceptionally well qualified to advise the city as to the appropriate form and a nature of what that program might look like. The other thing that I thought was exemplary was that the city looked to solve a regional opportunity on a regional basis and from the beginning really looked to craft an organization that was going to be I guess larger than Davis by having Yolo which has got a big agricultural load and is going to be very helpful in the success of the business as well as Woodland but has really left the door open to West Sacramento as well. And I think the other reason why the decision making was a positive one is I see this as a potentially excellent source of future revenue and also an instrument to bring energy to the ideals of the Davis community and to drive more sustainable energy in our midst. Thank you. Thank you Ezra, Mary Jo. I'm going to bring up the Sterling project. Because that actually brought my attention so much to what Davis needed to center its attention on and that was planning, planning for the future. The Sterling project came up all of a sudden and we realized those of us that lived in Rancho Yolo that we had something that we had to deal with across the street from us. And I think the main things that it brought up was that we weren't notified properly and learned about it after the fact when it was first coming to the city council that put us behind the eight ball kind of thing to really start acting aggressively to see what was going on. And actually as the project developed we were very solicited by the developers to support the project and of course we could not at that moment because it was way out of sorts for the general plan. I mean twice as dense, high five-story buildings six-foot story parking garage. And so we didn't quite know how to react to it and we kept working on it and working on it. And then it came down to the end of the project and they asked us to work with them to figure out what they could do to make us support it. Well that was gonna be a very difficult decision for me particularly because it met the demolition of the family first campus. And the family first campus if you have history in Davis know how it developed and who it served. The closing of it was not the fault of the children that were there or the staff. It was the fault of a non-profit that was outside of the county letting it disintegrate into what it became. Basically we finally did negotiate with the owners and we had to, we settled it. Thank you Mary Jo. Dan. The instance I'll talk about is the recent city action to put a street and road tax, a parcel tax on the ballot. And I think what it shows is both the strengths and the advantages of the city commission system and the limitations of that system. So the strengths were our finance and budget commission had passed a series of motions over the last couple of years urging greater accountability over any new tax measures. And we got some important provisions. For example, if the city diverts the money now going to streets and roads to other purposes the tax rate under this measure automatically goes down to zero. There's room for the three commissions to review expenditures before they happen and accountability after the fact. But there was a limitation to what we were able to achieve although we had some good things. What we also wanted was a balanced and comprehensive plan for solving the full $8 million fiscal problem that the city had. We don't have that. We've got a solution towards three of the eight on the ballot. I think part of that limitation is the fact that you need someone on that city council with the fiscal expertise. And I have someone in mind who every day can be on that dais and make the motions to make change happen. That's what I'm running for. Thank you, Dan. I'll keep this one. Linda. I get two microphones. Thank you. I'm looking at the process from coming at this from, I've not been here for 30, 40 years. I've been here for 10 years. So I've been able to look at it both from somebody in Sacramento looking at, gosh, how does Davis make its decisions? How do they decide how they're gonna do development? And it's like, oh gosh, it seems like there's a lot to it and there's a lot of public participation and people vote on everything. It's like, okay, I come here and I see that. I've been attending the commission meetings. I've been attending the city council meetings and talk about a robust public participation. Boy, do people show up. And boy do they have things to say. But what I don't hear as much of are the voices of our, well, what I don't hear is that certain voices are not being heard. And those voices would be, oftentimes our own commissioners, our volunteer commissioners. For example, a development comes before the city and it's gonna go through open space commission. It's gonna go through planning. It's going to go through fiscal. It's going to go through social services. It's gonna go through all of these. Oftentimes these show up to them as an idea of, oh, I think I'd like to build this, but I'm not exactly sure. Why don't you tell me your ideas for affordable housing? Why don't you tell me your ideas about how we can best do this? Well, how about developer? You come to us with the more fleshed out project so we know exactly what we're looking at here because we need to know. We have very expert commissions here, very expert commissioners on those commissions. They want to know, they want to put the time into seeing what is best for the city so that when it gets through the planning commission on up to our city council, they know what they're voting on. And more importantly, when those decisions come before the voters, we know it's been fully vetted by the experts in town and by our city council. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. Eric. Yeah, so an issue I wanted to talk about actually was particular to the work that I've done on the bicycle and transportation and street safety commission. I've been serving on that commission for a number of years. And one of the issues that we recently tackled was what to do, what we can do as a city to help with the Unitrans budget shortfall that's kind of coming upon them. So basically at this point, we have sort of an issue with Unitrans where they're running out of funding and they're needing a little bit about additional support and help. So what we ended up doing was I led the efforts to start up a subcommittee within my commission and we took on the task of trying to provide recommendations through our subcommittee that we can then forward as official policy recommendations to our city council. So this involved conducting research. I did a lot of research through my own work as a transportation scholar at the University of Transportation Studies, ITS at campus and conducting leader interviews with leaders within the community and so this is actually a lot of the work that I did in a previous time in Afghanistan doing a lot of work with community leaders reaching out to neighborhood and religious elders and tribal elders and kind of employing a lot of those same interpersonal dynamics and communications and also collecting a lot of data from folks that were just users of the system. So during my 50th anniversary bus tour of the city of Davis on Unitrans, I talked to a lot of riders about that. What we ended up doing was producing a report that ended up having specific recommendations calling for granularity on an audit that was being conducted by the university on the Unitrans system to ensure we weren't going to be missing that piece. Also posing a number of pilot programs and pilot projects and providing those recommendations to council such as having some folks in our business community being able to sponsor stops and being able to sponsor particular routes and services to be able to provide some of that additional revenue to help augment the suffering budget that we have with Unitrans. All of that together, we're able to tackle a problem and find a more effective way to move the policy down the field and I feel it went very well. Thank you, Eric. Okay, we have one more two minute question. Again, the candidates have not heard this question. We're gonna begin with Louise and I'll read it twice. Take one issue in your platform and explain why you think it's important to the city of Davis and explain your plan to address the issue. So take one issue in your platform and explain why you think it's important to the city of Davis and explain your plan to address the issue, Louise. Yes, okay. Since I started campaigning last October, I was the second person to announce my candidacy in the Davis Enterprise. I've been talking to a lot of residents, students, seniors, business owners downtown. I've been door-to-door downtown every day almost. And tabling at the Davis Farmers Market, I met many, many young families with children and saying that they just moved to Davis because of the quality schools, because of the quality community. Very excited to be here being part of the Davis community and I can understand certainly why I was born here. I'm raising my own two children. I have a sixth grader. As is her child, I sell elementary. I have a four-year-old daughter in preschool. This fall she'll be in kindergarten. And so this is my native home. And so Davis is facing a housing crisis. We need to develop housing. We need smart planning, smart growth planning, smart housing. We need to convene realtors, developers, people, business leaders and we all need, we are all stakeholders here and we need to convene and establish partnerships and find ways of building homes for people to live in. And that's very important. Moving forward, especially for the future generations of Davis sites, my children, your children, everybody. I live here because it's a small town. I grew up in Yolo County. A lot of people I've encountered, they live here because they enjoy the community, the small town flavor, the small town character. That's why I'm here. I live in New York City where I completed a PhD at Columbia University and now I'm here to raise in my family and I'm part of this community. And when elected, I wanna make that happen. Thank you. Thank you, Louise. Mark. The city now admits to an $8 million deficit on a roughly $50 million general fund. I say admits to because they've denied they had a deficit for several years even though it's been obvious to those who are looking at the data that there's one existed and we've got tens of millions of dollars of unfunded obligations that we've created over the time. City has to start paying its bills. And the way we need to do that is by increasing our revenues, not by taxation to making life more expensive for everybody but by generating more business activity through economic development. The definition of economic development is to create opportunities for residents to improve their quality of life. And that's what we need to do, creating new jobs so that people can have a chance to improve their life and also so that the city can generate more revenues. City, our size, if you compared to other university towns about our size should have a general fund closer to $100 million, not $50 million. And the reason we don't is because we haven't allowed businesses to expand in town. Our latest general plan which is now almost 20 years old called for 200 new acres of commercial development. It was necessary, thought to be necessary, 20 years ago to in order for the city to have enough revenue to pay its bills. We didn't do it. We didn't expand at all. We haven't made the effort to create the business that we need to pay the bills that we've run up. If we want to do that, address our challenges now rather than passing it off to our children and grandchildren to pay for, it's time for us to start implementing the plans that we've had over the years. Ever since the first core area plan in 1961 we've talked about building business and we haven't done it. It's time to start doing it. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Ezra. Well, it's a tough choice. Thank you. It's a tough choice to choose one particular issue. I think I'm gonna go with fiscal sustainability. I think my plan to address fiscal sustainability is to look at the revenue side of the equation and look for the opportunities. And I think that the Valley Clean Energy is going to be a key part of bridging the revenue gap. I think looking at how we better harness the UCD professors that are creating great intellectual property, et cetera, and creating an incubator for commercialization of that IP is something that I want to turn my attention to as somebody who has started two businesses along the lines of new technology. But fiscal sustainability is two parts. First is on the revenue side and the second is on the cost side. And I think what I want to look at on the cost side are two things, mainly. One is, are we operating efficiently? And I talk in my literature around the benefits of benchmarking and comparing how we're doing things to how other comparable cities like San Luis Obispo or Corvallis are doing things and make sure we're efficient. But the other element is trying to control unnecessary costs. Now one of the questions I have is given we're going out to the community to raise taxes. Why is it that we added 15 new rules to a base of about 423, which is in rough terms around three to four million dollars of annual additional liability? So if we didn't hire those folks, we'd already be halfway to the $8 million shortfall. Thank you. Thank you, Ezra. Mary Jo. Well, my main platform and the reason why I'm here is because I've witnessed in regards to some of the issues that I've been involved with, the Canary and also the Sterling project, the need for more planning. We are basically doing piecemeal planning in regards to the way our general plan reads and zoning regulations are. And I would like to, my platform really would like to see the update of our general plan and starting with a citizens review committee to really look at with the housing needs of Davis. And then with the housing needs of Davis looked at and sort of delineated, then sort of redo the general plan to reflect those housing needs. Then to go forward and find out if we can, how we can actually implement those housing needs. And that might mean that we need to look at our land and how it's so expensive that we cannot build on it, homes that we kind of need. And those are the ones for the middle income folks that want to move here. And I would like to put forth that this is a, definitely will be in review in two years when we look at Measure J and Measure R. But in that regards, before that, we can really sit down and come together and actually say where Davis wants to be in 20 years and how we get there and what we're able to compromise with. And I believe that we come together and we make those decisions and go forward. We can't keep going what we're doing now or else where all we're gonna be is a community, a very high income homes and those that can qualify for the affordable, affordable income homes. And I want to get that middle back that the homes that we were able to buy when we moved here 40, 30, even 20 years ago and then be able to have our better diversity of population. Thank you. Thank you, Mary Jo. Dan. I'd like to talk about how I would like to change and improve the relationship between the city of Davis and the UC Davis campus. Any day now the campus is gonna release a new plan that by their numbers will increase the campus population by 24% for the next 10 or 12 years. The campus is at the hub, it's the important part of the vibe of this community and I think the city is very important to the campus. But that next wave of campus growth will aggravate the budget and housing problems that we're all very familiar with. We need to create an effective two way working relationship like Santa Cruz has done, like Berkeley has done. The city of Berkeley gets a $2 million revenue stream from the Berkeley campus and it's an effective two way relationship because they're working together has resulted in opportunities for additional student housing and economic development in downtown Berkeley. We need to cut the same kind of deals, get the same kind of advantages that these other college communities have been provided. I think we can really help each other. I would wanna know in negotiations with campus of how we deal with the next wave of growth, what can we do to help them succeed? I went to that campus, I'm a die hard Aggies basketball fan, I'm a little disappointed by what happened in the first round of the playoffs. But I really think that we can look out for each other's interest and be a stronger city and a better campus all at the same time. Thank you. Thank you Dan, Linda. The number one issue on all of my materials deals with housing and deals with providing entry level housing for our community here. I remember when I came out of college, I was running a room, after that I was in an apartment, after that with my girlfriend and I, we were able to get a 900 square foot home in Sacramento. We all start from somewhere and from that home was able to get to a larger home and to the place I'm at now in Davis. But we are lacking here in Davis, are those entry level homes? We don't have any more those split lot duplexes that many of us started out with here in Davis. We don't have any more available multi-unit housing for folks to get their start out here. I would like to go forward by working with our developers, working at the, looking at the projects, coming online and saying show us more housing that is in that size of the 1100 square foot, the 900 square foot. They want us, certain developers would like us to downsize from our big homes into other types of homes over on Covel. That's great, but I'm not gonna downsize from a 2200 to another 2200 square foot home. I might downsize into something half that size. Multi-unit housing is essential here, not only for our students in town, but also for other working professionals coming into Davis and who want to stay in Davis. It can be downtown, it can be other parts of town. We all are going to share enhanced housing here in Davis. I too would like to be looking at the UC and how we can work together in providing that housing. Is it gonna take a little push? Probably, who's the best person to deal with doing that push? Probably an attorney who's quite willing to take on the big guys. And I will do that with regard to UC Davis. But come on, let's all come together and provide entry-level housing for all of us here in town. Thank you, Linda. Eric. So with the community that is comprised of over 50% renters and as the only individual before you, who is a current renter, who's living paycheck to paycheck, who understands the realities of over half of this town that is struggling to access the Davis Dream, my first and foremost priority is to represent and ensure that we are not going to lose the rest of those within that space to other places around outside of our community. So bolstering our renter protections is very important to me. It's something that I feel on a day-to-day basis and it's something that I'm gonna be fighting for every single day while on the council. And that also kind of gets to a larger point of ensuring that we can provide the steps and the pathway for our young professionals and those who are falling outside of the grasp of being able to be a part of the Davis Dream and attain the Davis Dream, giving them the tools that they need to be able and the infrastructure that they need to be able to succeed. So this comes into play when we're talking about upgrading our fiber optics and promoting community broadband internet. This comes into play with proposing different initiatives for some of our project proponents and those that are willing to build in our community. Perhaps what we can start doing is working on sort of proposing initiatives for micro-homes, for accessory dwelling units, for setting up and incentivizing those that have the privilege of owning land within the town, giving them the opportunity and the incentives through the city to be able to subdivide some of their land, be able to provide accessory dwelling units, to be able to help provide some of that pathway and help pitch in as part of a community to solve the problem. This is gonna take all of us standing forward and standing up to take care of these issues and it's very important that we're able to make sure that we can have that pathway for housing and pathways, especially for our renters who are feeling the pinch and are feeling the struggle most within our community. Thank you, Eric, Larry. So I'm having a problem. I don't like to think of any one issue in a vacuum and I think the best solutions are elegant solutions that really address more than one issue. So thinking about this while the others were talking, I think the downtown is a really good analogy, microcosm of the city as a whole. So I'm on the downtown plan advisory commission and we hear a lot of things. I've been hearing a lot of things just as a citizen about adding people living downtown, not having so much focus on the automobile, being able to walk and drive and of course the concern, everybody's concern about the vacant storefronts. So this is an area where I think a great solution addresses, if not all the problems in Davis, a lot of the big ones. So if we do the downtown right or if we do development anywhere in Davis, right, we get housing that people can afford. If the housing is designed so people can afford it, if it's smaller square footage as people have said to bring the cost down. And if storefronts are filled, if we, so getting those storefronts filled with local businesses, putting redeveloping downtown so that or there and the rest of Davis so that we get the multi-use out of each square foot. So that helps the housing situation. That helps the economic development situation, especially if we ensure that these developments actually pay for themselves. That's a whole nother topic for a whole nother day, but it reduces our carbon footprint. If people can live downtown, walk to the train station and if they don't have to commute to their job outside of Davis, but actually work in Davis, it can also improve our quality of life. We have people walking around downtown. We have people living downtown. That brings more and better businesses downtown. Five, four, three fade to black. Thank you so much. Thank you, Larry, Gloria. Okay, so everyone already took all of them. Good thing. And no, I think that our relationship with the university is key to everything we do. The university drives how many people live here. They drive the cost of our housing up. They drive our economic development. It's absolutely imperative that our relationship with the university be productive for us and for them. And I think that we need to partner. We need to partner with them as Dan down there was talking about there are models. There's Berkeley, there are other university towns. And so we can sort of decide which way we want our model to go. But definitely I think that we need to drive our economic development up. It is the thing that is going to help us financially be financially solvent. It's probably the most important thing for us to do. Also with that, we have to expand our tax base. And expanding our tax base is not just businesses, it's also building more homes. We do need to build more homes. That's sort of a given. And how we do that is going to be really important. How we build our housing in Davis is something that people are the most vocal about. And I think that we have to be very collaborative in how we do that. And we also have to, again, be very brave in how we do that. Thank you, Gloria. Okay, we are at our final question. This will be a one minute question. And we'll start with Ezra. And this is one minute for your closing statement. So first of all, I would like to thank all of you for getting involved. I think the community involvement is going to be key to our success in the future, tackling our collective challenges. I think it's fantastic. I understand from the Davis City website that we are the most educated community in the country. And I think that's also one of our great strengths. I believe everything I read on the internet. But nonetheless, the secret to our tackling these problems, these are not just Davis problems. These are nationwide. These are California-wide problems, housing affordability, fiscal sustainability. But I believe, again, the secret will be working together as a community to solve them. I believe that my values, having grown up here and my education and my business experience can help make a difference for you on the council. And I would like to ask for your vote today. Thank you. Thank you, Ezra Beeman. Mary Jo Bryan. I also want to thank you all. We had no idea how many people were going to show up and this is really wonderful. It reminds me back when the League of Women Voters would have candidates forums and they were packed and there was no room. And this is great to see this on there. I just want to say that I have a great amount of experience with my 44 years of being here in Davis. And I have a lot of resources also that I hope to bring to the city council. I know how the city works and I'm ready to serve. And to serve you well. And I would ask for your vote. Thank you. Thank you, Mary Jo. Dan Carson. Today we enjoyed a conversation about what we each would do as a city council member if we were fortunate enough to be elected. What I think it's also important to talk about is about how we can work together as a community to make progress on the serious challenges we face. We are an engaged and passionate community but finding agreement amongst our passions sometimes is very difficult. Just watch council some Tuesday night. I would reach out to listen and learn from every perspective. Not everyone feels comfortable going down to city hall and testifying at city council meetings. I promise to go to every neighborhood and to every segment of our community to understand how city hall can work for them. I will use the full depth of the experience I've had in four decades of a professional career to build common ground and mutual benefit so that we can go forward. Please vote for me for city council. I'll work hard to ensure we remain committed to sustainability, family, and education for generations to come. Thank you, Dan. Linda Dios. This has been a wonderful experience to see all of you out here and I guess others who are watching online. We care in Davis. We are passionate in Davis about what type of community we want to have here. I am passionate about representing everybody as to the best of my ability here in Davis. I will always strive to maintain and build upon these passions to protect the Davis that we all do love by maintaining my independence, by making sure that the process is transparent so that all of us know who is involved, what they are involved for, and why they are involved. I would be honored to have your voice, have your vote, and to be your voice. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. Eric Goetz. Thank you, everybody, for taking your time out of your day to listen to us and to be here with us today. So for my service overseas in Afghanistan with the US Army as an intelligence operations officer, for my work here in the community working on criminal justice reform, drug policy reform, social justice, and many different respects, for my research at the Institute of Transpiration Studies and with the Campus Travel Survey, for my work with youth communities and other communities around this community in this region, I feel that I have the necessary qualifications, experience, expertise, and passion to help each and every one of you get that much closer to the Davis dream that we all know and love. We have a big job ahead of us, we have a lot of work to do, and I have the passion, dedication, energy, enthusiasm, and vitality to be able to help all of us reach that Davis dream and ensure each one of us has a seat at the table in Davis. Thank you so much. Thank you, Eric. Larry Gunther. Hi, public comments gonna start as soon as we're done. Most of what the city council does in my experience relates to finance and land use planning, but how we affect those changes has a big impact on carbon footprint, on social justice, quality of life. We are very fortunate in Davis to have a super active community and to have a commission system filled with intelligent problem-solving people. Really listening to the members of the community, the stakeholders, and building a collaborative process to make a quality end result is what I'm about. There are a lot of decisions to be made. We've got a downtown plan update, general plan update, legalizing cannabis, renewing measure are, all these things are coming up. We've got a lot of work to do, and this is a great time to be in Davis. This is the dream phase of the remodel, when we get to decide what it's gonna look like for the next 100 years. Thanks. Thank you, Larry. Gloria Partita. All right, so it's obvious that you have a lot of very passionate people to choose from here, and I have had a lot of community involvement. My community involvement has provided me experience in finding resources, collaborating, having hard conversations, and making tough decisions. My experience as a scientist has taught me to make those decisions on evidence, and my experience as a nonprofit founder, small business owner, have taught me to balance the bottom line and maintain quality and integrity. I look forward to sharing this experience with my community, and I invite anyone to please contact me if you have further questions and also stop by my table and talk to Tracy. She's really good. Thank you, Gloria. Luis Rios. Hi, what do I bring to the table as city council member? I work in state government for over 12 years. I'm a fiduciary officer, a steward for the state of California at a state agency, California Department of Education. My duties include contract administration, budget planning, approving expenditures. I manage over $6 million worth of contracts. That means I strongly believe in ethics, transparency, trust, accountability. I interface with Department of Finance, Department of General Services. I consult legal counsel on matters, terms and conditions that I easily understand. I really understand state government. That's what I bring to the table as a candidate, and I look forward to serving you honorably with integrity, hard work, and thank you. I'll look forward to speaking to you afterwards. I have UC Davis college students who are there to answer your questions, and I'll be there myself. Thank you. Thank you, Luis. Mark West. Thank you all for being here, and thank you for my colleagues up here. I learned a lot listening to everybody, and it's fun to have this conversation. My parents came to town when they were students. They stayed, raised their family, loved the place, loved the community. I grew up here. I went away for school, came back. When my kids were ready for school, raised a family, really two of them. Our two birthdaughters are gone, and now we have four adopted kids that we're raising as well. I want Davis to be a place where you can do that, where you can grow up here, or come to school here, and fall in love and stay, and create a life for yourself and a life for your family. I think we've lost that, and I think it's time for us to get back to that. We need to do it through creating opportunity for people. We need to move away from the protectionist mindset of I've got mine, and I don't want anyone else to touch it, and get to a mindset where we are creating chances for others, for everybody, to improve their quality of life. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mark. I want to thank all the candidates and thank Siv Energy, Leslie Hunter, Bob Bung. I just want to make two quick announcements. First, I want to thank Davis Media Access. You can see their cameras here. They're filming the event. You'll be able to see it on the internet or at DCTV. If you don't know, Davis Media Access is the nonprofit community media center serving the Yolo County. Its mission is to enrich and strengthen the community by providing alternatives to commercial media for local voices, opinions, and creative endeavors. For more than 30 years, DMA has produced voter education programming for races ranging from school board to Congress. So that's my first thing. The second thing is that if you came in through another door, you might not know that we're taking questions from the audience. There's three by five cards in the back. If you fill that out, we'll post them on the Siv Energy website for the candidates to respond to. So we have refreshments for you back there, and then you can take your refreshments and go and talk to the candidates. Thanks for attending.