all right everyone again thank you all for being here first before we actually jump into the opening statements for the candidates i do want to again give a shout out to the groups separate this forum on some of them have not done this type of political engagement before and so i'm sorry can work trying to i'm sorry there we go so some of these groups have not done this type of work before in so if you don't know if it takes a lot to get folks to come out on in and you about brain choice voting for those of you who don't know about the change in st paul's voting system we have a super super cool way to vote we not have to vote for just one rules for the forum so i guess that each candidate will have two minutes to start with an opening statement each candidate will also have two minutes to answer the question each candidate will also have one minute t your question am the moderator reserves the right to kill anyone out of the town hall i will try not to do that as long as everyone is respectful sout candidates questions about the rule been on the board of education in st paul served ten years on the board of education and also i spent twenty six plus years with the same paul police department i know the math doesn't quite work on that but during the time i was on the police department i was also on the board of education so really a couple of great opportunities to understand the neighborhood and knowhow things were going to serve certain people of the sort of children and to try and make this  great place to live to raise children and to have a job and it's been a little struggle out here for several years and i think things are beginning to turn the corner and if i own a bit of advice that i got from my dear dad many many years ago when he said son the harder you work the luckier you give and i have never forgotten that and it's that good voice that they had cast the line actually my father was an immigrant he came here from sweden a to hear from kevin ba was in english as a second language teacher many years ago in atlanta ga i am fairly new to say paul as far for six i went to college and can core university when it was just concluded college back in the sevent and at that time i was actually planning to become a preacher about my father's death from cancer when i was in college so i changed that route and i took a different direction and i spent the next twenty years in the computer business primarily as a corporate trainer and technical writer where i would frequently be called in to help work with groups of five systems programmers who were from different cultures and different ethnic groups to learn to get along and sometimes just a communication barrier so i would often service kind of a translator but more so he was helping them to learn some of the technical and business jargon which often does not come in the first two or three levels of e s l so that was my world for some time after twenty some years in doing that i had a mid life crisis at the age of fifty and instead of buying a fishing boat or water cycle i went to seminary three years later i have a master's degree an interfaith counseling i went on to work at the v a hospital in sioux falls south dakota where i focused on post i have to sit down and listen to you and that is my promise is that i basically have a professional listener and that is m same for about fifteen plus years i'm running for several reasons one i was encouraged by one of my representatives to run too i always had a love and passion for natural and human communities  i love doing landscaping just as much i love taking groups of people and being involved to people and facilitating great things in a sense being a gardener of communities and third out running because i'm hearing a lot from you ciders that they're frustrated with how the city is run is being run and accessing your city council and from a city organizer perspective that's something that really  frustrates me whenever i see that happen i'm running as an independent nonpartisan person i know i don't think the local politics needs to have any kind of parties involved in it i always look at finding solutions as being a joint effort and then it takes a lot of education and human exchanges to be able to your home and i resigned to be better and i think i have a lot of community nice things skills to be able to make those connections between people and help make that garden police buddy cameras it sounds really really simple and i'm probably uniquely positioned to talk about this a little bit having been in situations as a police officer and some of the things that police officers get into in the city and i'm here to tell you what they see during most of their days and their years on the job isn't really generally people don't call the police when things are going well something's something's wrong something's broken somebody insert somebody who's injured somebody else and then you call the police well and the buying hammers are interesting because next thing you're going to hear there's all this thing was probably his attention only turned off so we didn't see that so the the whole business when you think of the city of st paul the six hundred police officers working twenty four hours a police department that works twenty four hours a day and the number of people that are on the street any time during that time you're literally like a wind up with probably thousands of hours of time  recorded on a daily basis the question is then who uses access to the information from those cameras when you search for your most cameras and they reported eight hours of police work or ten hours from each officer that was on the job who's going to be assured of saying this is public this is a public this is a huge huge issue the tables are this getting cameras  information is available to the public on my right to privacy has potentially been my only good and i don't have any say in that i believe that body cams can be useful but i think it will be part of the problem i think the problem is much deeper than what happens between police and citizens of their i think the problem with this is why do we need police out there to begin with and so we get a community building to all kinds of this but i would  in some ways we've already gone down this road because all the vehicles the police vehicles have cameras on them and so there's a lot of filming going on already and so there are some technical issues in terms of trying to manage is as devastate d but i would go again behind what's behind this issue and that is why is it that we don't trust our police force enough and that we need to have this visual visual  verification that they're doing their job well and that means a lot more community work means in my mind a lot more human exchanges positive human exchanges between our police force to make it so that kids will say when i substitute teach and what i hear from many black kids is that they seeing young black kids all see their brother and sister potentially their brother being taken down by a cop out police officer and so that creates a very negative image for the that young child and by having some more positive image i don't know if any of you guys would remember this particular program by the officer friendly program where an officer would come here and at the elementary school level starting in kindergarten where they would have explained to kids what they do and in more in depth way and details play and then and if you get to sixth grade or seventh grade they can actually discuss the brother who is potential that was negatively affected by the police force and then directly affect that incident in a positive way up that it's much easier to become a policeman if you have a military background than if you're new social work background and i think that can be a real problem frankly that i will endeavor to down because i just discovered in a recent forum that he was a big part of cleaning up part of the neighborhood according to college right around the time i was there and i understand dan's background and if frankly if i thought every policeman could be like a damn bostrom i think would be great but i don't think th more yeah i would concur with kevin's idea that the background of a place officer when they're coming in is an important thing to that as we choose to lease officers but again the idea that with these human exchanges there's more likelihood that people are going to understand just like dan was saying that that police officers can be coming and have seen or have seen not in the very in the very  future some more horrific or more tense situations they see the worst of the worst so that's a good point the human exchanges are going to increase that understanding between th i don't have any plans at all to expand service because i don't hold of the issues because i haven't heard enough about the situation having not been on the council before i would need to study seriously and i do know that when i lived in the twin cities  walk to get where they want to get to where they want to go and then the suburbs actually where my house is our main place which is next to play failon was considered kind of an outskirts and had to have a trial system that went out going down maryland and so there was an extensive system of permanent transportation and one of the advantages to i say my future ideas for public transportation is that it be more permanent and the reason that i that shows that when you do is as a public entity or as a society and best money and something that cannot be moved then the businesses that come around it they realize that they will choose to build there and because they know people will come there and that's of the permanence has an economic development effect to it and so my idea if i  or any kind of mass transit but i would be in favor of generally speaking more permanent oriented stuff and then the buses to get people to the permanent stuff permanent life i think the only thing i would add today is that i would favor a more private enterprise involvement in any mass transit solution i'm not sure exactly what the legal relationship is between the current us system and the is in terms of affordable housing a lot of affordable housing is subsidized by the federal government and it is my understanding where having a lot of the housing that was set   is now coming due in a sense that usually the contractual relationship is that they have to have affordable housing projects in their very time and then they can open up the free market housing  so then people are not ready to be i'm homeless and i sat there and i mindset that they're not ready for that and so that would mean that the kind of services that we offer so that dorothy day or or some other that that kind of system we need i mean would help to be funded  at the local level so at this point i would have to say i need to learn a lot more than that and this seems a question th there and most of those folks are winding up on may have in their demands are probably a foot or two apart men and women it's sleep in the same room with a row of sheer down the middle separating the m and the women a terrible situation and there are there's a lot of reasons for homelessness there's no question about that and there's a lot of folks out there who was this through no fault of their own things happen i come to this issue from two different perspectives on the same going to sleep i'm very pro business and independent businessman for many years and i happen to believe that a large share of the homes problem  informal housing problem comes down to jobs and if businesses had lower taxes and lower insurance requirements they would be able to start and run and expand and create jobs which would reduce the need for you know they would be able for better homes the other side of the issue it is as a mental health profession there are far too many stigma associated with mental health and so when somebody has been labeled as having p t s d or depression or schizophrenia or you name it there's this not in my backyard and so for me if we could put the two systems together or one is pro business and let the businesses grow to create jobs and then have private charities and churches working with very limited government supervision or guidance working on not education about mental defect that would be at i guess i don't fence about the situation because i have a little bit of cabin everywhere when wages are that from the outside then they can create some hardships on the business is saudis and their ability to be able to provide services and compete on the other hand i also feel that i'd win well any mention of an i phone right now you know that that i phone is built on the backs of of some people who are suffering a lot from the labor conditions that they're and so i certainly wouldn't want that in terms of the army being promoted my first aid would be fifteen dollars an hour might be on the higher side for me are you aware of the cost of living and what it will cost actually to rent out an apartment in sort of be able to just meet with that wage even with recognizing that that would be a wage necessary to make a living ok if that's the case where folks are standing in the city well in the subsidized wages for businesses if they were pa increase next year and that basically keeps the city of st paul functioning approximately the way we are today i can't even begin to imagine what it would cost to subsidize every  but i don't have any influence on a lot yeah and this is where i'm going to be jumping the shark and just waters here perhaps i personally do not support the minimum wage period and that is because  the free market will take care of the problem when i was growing up there is no way i expected to pay all my rent working at a minimum wage that was one incentive to work or get promoted or get a better job or find a new company so if a whole the company is were competing against each other for the best workers oh they do that by raising their wages i have heard arguments that henry ford for example raised the then stand wage and the many government of many components of government controlled or government mandated building way joe will refer to them and i like to see well and reward for it was a private citizen running a private company and i more power to any company that wants to raise their wages because you will the other tract more people and they will stay with you but if your own money is not willing to pay you have a better wage then you're going to  business and i don't think the government has any business in that whole process involving kids who don't have a say in terms of whether they're going to be able to block to make money and they're there they're wards in a sense so many stay care at some point and so that's where the minimum wage in terms of making sure that the caregivers do make enough money to be able to care for their children so there is a link between living wages and helpless as you are if you're making i understand that link  see several questions around this issue also within the past several weeks there's been several shootings on the east side as the representative for  and then we have person that was shot and killed at the playground on the bus and he's a pervert at the other two or three o'clock in the morning so who does that kind of stuff not the kind of people that you would i would want to hang around with on a regular basis there are simply my friends are some very very dangerous people that there was a book years and years ago and why they really had to do that with law enforcement does that affect the way between civility and criminality and if and it is a thorough and there are a lot of folks if there is a police presence and neighborhoods that are here that are there i did hear an interesting idea i'm not too long ago when i started this campaign about police fire and b m d's the fact the matter is the fire and he ts are not running around looking for fires to put for people to take the hospital we'll call you when we need you but otherwise we'll take care of ourselves i think in many societies it is far too easy to call anyone one rather than try to work it wrong drugs and i personally favor legalization of marijuana and i believe that if you take all the resources that are focused on the war on drugs and put all those resources into these two more serious crimes we growing parental factor that happens and that is all because of numerous societal reasons and create the children or the parents i mean the adults who are addicted to the drugs that are  kevin mentions so i'm not i really want to would not want to take a fear factor approach to this but i agree also that taking ownership is important the police calling nine one one is kevin was suggesting he's not in a very dangerous situation yet it is the wise choice you don't yourself kill but as someone who's who's survived cancer there's life is something you want to experience now and what you need to live it now and and safeway's doing that the more neighbors that care about what happened that when someone's walking down the street a simple hello if that person has mean has negative intentions for your neighborhood they will very likely not stick around they will move on and i know that there might be some it could be some cultural elements to that that would make that comfortable to do but having simple human several people still in the area where this happened they're trying to talk to people to get information and they cursed at the police office so you want to you wonder ok what are what are we supposed to do in some of these circumstances because the police were there when this happened there were people standing around that saw that there are people out there that know what is going on they have to feel free and feel a responsibility to let the police know so  go after the bad guys that's what we want to do we want to get those people off the street to protect their law abiding citizens when i see evil people i'm not in love i'm there says there's there's a handful  mothers and all of those things have to be taken into consideration completely agree with him that when you see people who are behaving evil we need to remove them from society until we can give them  paper that they think might be causing the problem so that's understand the mindset they might be in that mindset and so what would negate or made that not so likely to happen is if we had foot patrols or bike patrols more often down pain or in areas that are very tense an arcade in our neighborhood an arcade to local and national visitor is a pilot daily basis as well as add jobs for under served community however parking has been an ongoing issue what is your plan to address parking issues for businesses like model village so that is this is can drive and how will you or we be able to change the safety of the entrance and exit for civilians i don't think i have any business saying that i have a solution for this because i am not directly involved i believe that my role as a council member would be to work with the people who are directly involved and help them come to a solution that is a win win as a councillor there's kind of an old story anybody who's ever been to therapy for example and i'm one of them it's often said that there are those who want you to visit them for six sessions and that's because the first two sessions are typically venting the third session is getting over it and finally the fifth or succession the real stuff comes up well when you don't have that much time and we're trained to ask why at least six times and finally at the sixth time you find out what is really going on underneath the issue and in my professional life as a as a counsellor as well as as an intercultural communications consultant a lot of those strains are about helping people to find out what is really going on what do you really want do you simply want to be heard or is are something going on here that is it is it's not in the service and so i believe that my role in my strength as a counselor would be to work as a facilitator and a mediator to help the people involved come up with their own solutions was talked about that there would be traffic issues on this one and it was not noted early in music nor to be honest at that level so from a city planner perspective that's where the state city star would have been and i forgot their recommendation to be honest but i know the public's perspective was there is going to be a problem  there was a photocopier and that sets a mistake and so we have to find some way to to fix that and that might mean changing in real design it johnson parkway it might mean changing the because no one wants to add another lane on johnson parkway probably i would suspect that would not be favored at all potentially on their level or are there could be something maybe there but there's limited options to fix the issue i would probably say but again as a city council person the talent and the observations come can come from love of august sources or from or from you and that's that's the problem and i child but if it's successful you're going to have one major problem right off the bat and those who are well i was a i was a seer of that because i didn't know how successful it was going to be and it's been very very successful question about it's located in the old convey here production facility was never laid out for that type of activity that has the building was originally designed probably a hundred people work whether or not they can get the heavy equipment in there in the parks department approves the plan because everything everything is everything is can contingent on the purchase of part of proving the point and so it can actually go that is that part of the city's job is to try to listen and also to educate as best they can so to make sure that if a developer comes in with a project that is believe that much can be said for at least everybody being at the same table of the same time and feeling heard and i may want this guy to be yellow well that's not going to happen but if i am told why it can't happen and i feel that ok you heard me and i understand that we did not foresee these problems well thank you for listening and i think sometimes that's all people need is to be heard and to know that the other people are at least considering the demographic make up of the east side communities which have now shifted to over fifty percent people of color as a white male what makes you a good  i grew up with baltimore maryland actually during the nineteenth century and they were forced to integrate their schools and so i think i was in a good time to be able to understand some of those tensions  those experiences then and i had as a community organizer and so i like i've looked at it and i look at natural systems i look at human systems and and terms of my training and also my experience and  just trying to survive and share our talents with each other as best we can and so i think i have a very open attitude to be able to see that and then when i am feeling male or female all these things will come into play question is whether our executive functions will quickly take over and switch and say no the filter doesn't apply because it is a natural thing that we create some pill just to help us understand our world so i feel comfy with the fact that i have the ability to recognize when i'm seeing something for what it's not and so the legs see what for what it make any difference is that the teacher is reaching her child and her child is a she we you were or who your boss is really doesn't make any difference if you're doing a good job if you're compensated fairly i think that's what we're all here's the question as directly as possible i cannot represent you i cannot represent anybody other than me when i was working as a chaplain at the sioux falls v a hospital i had the pleasure of serving on the american indian veterans  even if you walk a mile in my moccasins it's still you walking in my moccasins on me so i cannot represent the black community because i'm not black i cannot represent one community because and only you can represent your community my job would be to come and talk to you and find out what do you want because there's no way that i can know if you want but having said that i've lived in minneapolis i've lived in atlanta georgia for monday ten years where i was actually one of two lone white voices in an all black gospel choir i lived in kansas city which is a strong way to republish and i believe i know how to build bridges with communities but i think ultimately it's i know that i cannot represent you so i have to listen and find out what it is that you want and do the best i can with my background in intercultural communications and having been a teacher of english as a second language those are the skills i bring plus leadership and that kind of thing and frankly if i get halfway into this term and somebody showed steps out and i was a member of the mon community or any of the other minorities and said you know thank you for helping me but you're not really good job i'll step back and say please you step up and i'll obey your assistant or eat or whatever the positions like i did i am doing this because i was asked to conserve because some of i might be good at it but i really badly brought this up because the fact that there are three why goes up here that's a problem the fact that there weren't any monk or black candidates or the other any other minorities that felt that they had a voice in this process i think speaks to a problem that we need to address will yeah i'll just add one thing i want to intercultural something are back when i was in graduate school and i was very frustrated because i said what cannot as a weight meal do in a minority community you don't trust me i have no credibility and the answer i got was you can do nothing in our community in that from that perspective your audience is your community so it's going back to my white male community and when i hear an off color joke or a racist comment or somebody talking about immigration in a negative way it's my job to city that's not funny or if you don't know the answers you don't know the big picture you need to come live in my house and to post these questions on the facebook page make sure the candidates have no answer access to that invite and please answer the questions for the people and whether in there's a handle and he will give that for you so we're going to just wrap up with some closing statements from the candidates each person will have an opportunity to do two minutes closing and since we ended the last question with and starting first we will start with  six one of my motivations quite frankly for doing this is very selfish because i'm also a business owner stress management counselor and work on conflict resolution i thought what better way to get to know my new community than to run for office or for me to get on with the people and i would not move not door to door and i would just ask you know how are you feeling about city council already feeling about a neighborhood here and i kept getting encouragement believes please please we need change we need somebody who understands us better or understands all these cultural diversity we need new voices and that's primarily where i'm coming from is kind of the new voice idea but a voice that has an experience specifically intercultural communications and one of the things that i have noticed about st paul having come back to st paul after thirty some years it's not the way it was thirty years ago and i cannot assume that just because i was born and raised here or that a groove in the same neighborhood that i know how you feel again it would be neat walking in your moccasins not you i have to come in and gauge you in your community i really plot is ideal being out in the mobile area mobile office i definitely would do something similar to that but for me it's really just about being gauged with the people in the community and working back towards my underlying thing about getting back to grassroots and community involvement and let's take care of each other neighbor helping neighbor and less government involvement we can do it ourselves around here we actually live baltimore and california no family here so we've had developed relationships here accessibility issues i want to mention is that i will be your boss except accessible city council member ever i had someone as knock on the door when they said i've never had someone talk of mine to what i said oh wow ok i will be you know i'll be at libraries recreation centers i have that i'm not making a decision for you or the city's not making decisions for you and even if i make the same decision that you would choose that you came about it and not that i told you that this is what it would be the other thing i think i have a problem is that i when i hear people say they're leaving the site they're leaving the side because they say one reason is poor schools i know this school as a board of education they do most of the work in terms of divide to find how schools are going to be but as a city or education is the beginning of the future i kids are in our kids don't succeed in our family we don't have people who believe our kids can succeed on that school says and what we have here we will