event the others co sponsors are the union park district councils the senate if you park community council we have one chapter of the minnesota public interest research group and of course  this evening ross of course is council member and before that i was director of the midway transportation management organization tom as a community activist who is currently the chair of the house in the development committee and a leader of the thank you very much my name is lori souped up and i'm a member of the white bear lake area league of women voters is a nonpartisan volunteer political organization that encourages informed active participation of all citizens in government the l w p and the kids who made this event possible tonight do not endorse or oppose any political party or candidate the purpose of tonight's forum is to hear each candidate's few on a variety of topics council members must live in the ward they represent an area elected to a four year term as a legislative body the city council sets city policy through ordinances and resolutions the council has sole responsibility for adopting the city's budget and performs a quasi judicial role in hearing appeals the city council also serves as the library board which oversees the st paul library system and the housing and redevelopment authority council members also and other boards and commissions such as the st paul port authority and the water commission before we formally began please silence all cell phones tonight's form is being taped by c n n and will be rebroadcast on cable channel nineteen it will be available on line in a day or two and it will be rebroadcast on saturday october tenth at eight pm and sunday october eleventh at nine am and several other times each candidate will be given up to two minutes for an opening statement following that candidates will have two minutes to respond to written questions from the audience question cards are being collected no questions of a personal nature will be allowed are also allowing one minute career bottles if they choose question cards to become the property of the league of women voters in the form sponsors a timekeeper time your statements and give you two prompts the first is when you have thirty seconds left and the second is when you must finish your statement and stop talking no campaign signs or literature is permitted in the room a pad and pencil is provided for each candidate the use of electronic devices will not be allowed the sponsors and moderator reserve the right to ask disruptive audience members to leave and at seven fifty each candidate will be given two minutes for a closing statement please hold your applause until the form is concluded with that we will begin with our opening statements with tom goldstein ok well i'm glad to know that c n n is going to be covering this  means we did a really good job of turnout i know that was just a s p n and this is the broadcast you want to look at but i want to thank every i want to thank the league and all the sponsors for their help and bring this together and i want to apply to everyone for turning out  we really worked hard to get people here and i'm glad that we have a chance actually people to vet the issues so as a challenger i think it's a you know understandable to understand why i'm running why am i why am i challenge you to turn incumbent and i think it's for reasons over the last several years i've been involved in several community issues including a member school board from zero five to zero nine and like many of you i love same paul and want to see the city succeed and i think there's just too much evidence that this city is not actually working for residents as well as it needs to be and there is too much of a focus on corporate interests and downtown and downtown development to the exclusion of neighborhoods and in particular during the last two years i have worked pretty tirelessly on on three issues one has been fighting public funding for stadiums because i think it's a terrible use of public dollars and secondly i've been working to stop demolitions both in this community and other parts of the city because of the negative impact that they have on neighborhoods and the fact that when you replace them with mc mansions it is often the trend in both were for and more three it has a significant negative impact on the surrounding homes the third issue is universal broadband access whether we like it or not that is the future that is where opportunity is that's where all the major companies and the startups and entrepreneurs are creating jobs  commerce but more importantly within the schools we have i pads whether for good or ill that's been the decision and see in public schools and yet up to as many as a third of kids don't have internet access at home so if we're going to have a digital learning environment that works for everyone if we're going to have opportunity for everyone to participate in the information economy and just really think you we need to do better thank you russ stark thank you and great to see so many people here tonight russ stark i've been in office for two terms now live in the neighborhood have for about sixteen years i ran for office eight years ago talking about sustainability and livability as the two big components of what i wanted to work on that's what i've been working on for the last eight years clearly the green line has been a big thing happening in this part of town over the last several years both the construction and a lot of planning around what was going to happen around the green line over time and now that we're operational making sure that things are going well along that corridor as far as sustainability i've been really involved in transportation issues trying to make sure that we're maximizing our competitive advantage of the city which is that we are a place where people want to be able to walk and buy school around and be able to get places on transit in addition to be able to move around in cars these issues are not just kind of nice things for our community they actually are i think the backbone of an economic development strategy for our city because the cities of the twenty first century and in the us are competing to be those places where people want to go and the people on the move are twenty somethings and they're choosing where they want to go based on some of these characteristics so i think it's we're doing a lot of a lot of things well in st paul clearly we have some more work to do and one of the things that i would like to focus on more in the third term would be extending some of the great things that are happening in s paul to more folks in our community because clearly there are folks in our community who are not reaping those benefits and are still struggling and so making sure that our economy is working for people of color and lower incomes in our community i think is a big deal tom's done a great job of pointing out that of st paul residents are living in poverty twenty four percent that's a huge number and an even larger number than that frankly are are on the edge in terms of their family income and their day to day life and that's a big project for all of us to figure out how to as a commune eddie make sure that the that the folks who are living on the margins can do better have the opportunities thank you thank you for both work on  compromise give an example of when you did each i think that generally compromise has always been part of any issue that i've been involved with i think that as a as a elected school board member there were there were several issues in which i didn't necessarily agree with my colleagues  but was more was forced to compromise that's just the nature of of politics and the nature of life i think it's more the issue of what happens when you don't compromise and you see some of the dissension in the community for example we have the cleveland having a bike way is creating did the decision to have a cleveland have a new has created a lot of dissension in the community twelve hundred signatures against it that's me as an example of where compromise has not been reached and consensus has not been reached so that's not how i would be hit on that process i would be seeking more information and reaching out to residents to find out what we can do to figure out a solution so that the same public plan can work but it's not going to be shoved down certain streets where people are very resistant thank you pete the questions are so i share of the whole thing i will do that assuming elected officials need both courage to hold their ground and an ability to compromise give an example of when you did each so a couple of times several times actually i've been the one vote on six to one vote the city council for one couple that come to mind during the recession there was a lot of interest in trying to stimulate the economy there were a lot of development projects planned and proposed a lot of them in downtown one of them was the penfield project in downtown which is a big market rate housing project where the where the lawn store is actually it's turned up quite successful in terms of people renting the apartments and the grocery store being used however i thought it was too big an infusion of limited city resources into one project i also thought that the city should not be building on its own housing that didn't include affordable housing units and so i voted against it that was a that was a big vote and i think it took some courage because there was a lot of momentum to say hey we just have to invest in these projects no matter what because of the because of the recession in terms of compromise there been a number of issues where i have where i've worked toward compromise and honestly ended up either with both sides relatively happy or both sides relatively upset and sometimes compromising leads to everyone being unhappy and sometimes it's still the right thing to do one that comes to mind quickly is an issue on marshall avenue where we were dealing with a proposed median near cleveland marshall so people could more safely walk across the street and get to those businesses that is ease and some of those places and some of the neighbors wanted a long median that would block a lot of the turning movements some of the businesses were concerned about blocking off the left turn movements and i ended up finding what i thought was a compromise which was building the median but shorter's that maintaining some of the turn a movement for the businesses i ended up with literally all sides unhappy with me and sometimes you have to do that do everything yes i do because i misunderstood i thought it was a minute for so i gave a very brief answer first of all i think that you know it's important that that comes up because during my campaign i have not gone we have not gone over five thousand doors and we've knocked on a lot of doors in the area adjacent to marshall and i've seen a lot of folks that are very unhappy with the decision it's true rust is correct that people are unhappy on both sides but there's a real feeling that the process was even though there was lots of time spent it wasn't really a collaborative process repeal were being listened to and so when i knock on doors years later after this is supposedly been done and people are still pretty furious about it that concerns me i know some people are not but the fact that that kept coming up and i thought it had been a process it had been resolved the thing in terms of holding your ground i think that most of the things i've worked on have been pushing for things that matter fighting public funding for stadium insisting we do something to stop tear downs to just solve that problem instead of giving in to developers working on issues that may not be popular that politicians are not listening to but that you keep pushing for exists the right thing thank you would you like to hear comment just just briefly i'll say that one can do a lot of listening and still have people feel like they weren't listened to because they didn't get the outcome that they wanted and i do try to listen to all sides and think about what's best for the whole community and make the decision based on all the template that i think is best for the most people and sometimes people still feel like they weren't heard unfortunately bill well this is sort of along the same lines and go to tom first recent issues such as the soccer stadium and parking meters on grand avenue indicate a lack of policy discussion and interest in public input what would you do to address this well since those are issues that i've been particularly involved with i think although russ is stating that he's done a lot of listening there doesn't seem to have been a lot of listening done on these issues when when approximately eighty percent of people surveyed businesses and residents on grand avenue the senate here saying they don't want this and the city is still determined to go forward when there is no indication that consumers and shoppers have been saying grand avenue is a problem we want to change it indicated you're going to vote and russ has indicated that he's going to support meters on grand avenue when there's such opposition i think that's actually a lack of not listening this was the last time this was actually study was ten years ago to go forward now after ten years without revisiting it so much can happen in ten years you know that can be a lifetime so the fact that there hasn't been the kind of listening that has led to that outpouring i think is a concern of a lot of people it seems to be a way to raise revenue for the city which gets at the broader issue of how the city is using the revenue that it has back on the table i have a sheet here that shows a lot of what's been happening in the last two years and it's unfortunately it's not a pretty picture in terms of the city having paid out almost five million dollars from from everything botching the black bear crossings contract to police brutality claims to the police lab mishandling evidence to a million dollar payout in the collapse of the lilydale park and on and on and so i think it's a lack of process and a lack of paying attention the community as far as a soccer stadium it's great to say that you'll supportive all these conditions are met but what we know is that stadiums don't work the evidence is clear that they don't work the time we spend focusing on stadiums is time we can't spend addressing real issues like rebuilding the infrastructure that we've neglected for the past twenty years and so it's easy to say you'll support it is opposed to saying this is not going to work it's not going to be a catalyst we need to have a public process rather than decide what's going to happen and then see if we can move forward can i ask you both to talk real loud because the mikes just work through the cameras so all right ok so soccer and grand avenue parking these are two really easy topics  the the soccer stadium concept is one where i think initially my reaction was negative because i had been involved in a lot of community conversation over many years about what should be done with that site and a lot of that visioning was for a mix of housing office retail uses some public spaces and that's very different and at first blush in the concept of a stadium however i think there's an opportunity in the stadium in that right now there's a problem because there's the shopping center just sits there frankly the midwest owner does with some need for reinvestment and some help and it cash flows and so until something comes along to change the fundamental dynamics at that site we're going to still have an empty site on the back with a shopping center that we all wish was a little bit nicer in the front i think the stadium may be our opportunity to actually see some significant investment in that and that part of town it's a gateway site for our city we've all gotten tired of seeing a pile of dirt and selling in ninety four for the last fifteen plus years and so while that initial reaction of public funding for stadiums is a negative one i think if they're willing to build it then it's an opportunity for us to actually see a lot of positive things happen in the neighborhood as far as grand avenue parking this issue has actually been studied for twenty years there's been dialogue for twenty plus years there's no consensus there never will be a consensus this is one of those issues where for me personally because i believe it's the right thing to do it is important to keep listening but i do think that we have to kind of pull off the band aid and say hey when you have an urban commercial corridor with lots of demand for parking with lots of successful businesses where literally some businesses are essentially voted out because they need a variance of one or two parking spaces in the case of cupcake we have a problem and part of the solution is to manage parking better thank you first on grand avenue i think there's a there's a tone of we know better than you i think that you still need to lead listen to people whether you're you have expertise in urban policy or not you still have to listen to people because it's not a one size fits all solution i've not seen former i had a business on ground ever for fifteen years if you put parking meters in front you would have hamstrung my business and i had a successful business because people could come and go as do many businesses on grand avenue so the fact that there may be a solution out there in search of a problem isn't a reason to go forward but about the soccer stadium i have to be very clear it sounds great but the real question is why are we looking at a site that's so ugly twenty years later what has rosen has what has russ an his colleagues done in the past eight to ten years to actually address it i would argue if they've been moving forward and actually work following up on the work that russ himself did before he was on the council that we'd already be making progress instead of sitting back and waiting for somebody to come up with an idea and bill moyers history he is not going to pay for this by himself none of them do and we can go into this in another about bill mcguire's history and why i don't trust them acquire any billionaire owner th yeah and i appreciate tom recognizing the work that i did before i was elected and thinking about the snelling and university site and the fact of the matter is we did a lot of work over the last eight or ten years we do not control the property the m council on the property in the back they only recently came to us and said hey let's work together figure out a plan for the site we're now willing to sell it the shopping center owner has the most cards at that table they own the biggest part of that site and until they're ready to be involved in some kind of joint development with the met council nothing's going to happen and that's kind of a catch twenty two that we've been in for a long time on terms of listening on things like grand avenue parking i do think we have to listen i also think as i mentioned rip off the band aid and then have the conversation about the details and we do have to work out the details of where residents going to park what's what kind of short term parking versus longer term parking where employees going to park but that there are some conversations where if you start it with should we do this you know the answer is always going to be no and sometimes you have to stand up and do the right thing thank you i think we need to change the format to allow for more time to  because we're having very short answers to issues that are somewhat complicated i don't think it serves either of us that well to have to give i think it is more complicated but we're by by the rules but i just we had said that we might go to eight fifteen and i think we're going to the single most important issue facing ward four and how would you work to fix it i don't think there is one single most important issue i think there are many issues because of the nature of this format i would refer people to both my website in my campaign with where i've i've attempted to provide very detailed information so that you don't get soundbites you can actually get that you can see the thoughtful effort i've made to try to state my position i think we can't think in terms of silos i think ward four has many issues that are very similar to what's facing the city and i think what happens in one ward will impact another so we can be doing a great job in word for but we're we're not doing a great job in other parts of the city it's going to impact us and word for unfortunately i think the soccer stadium has emerged unnecessarily into this big issue but it does underscore the fact that we've had this large parcel in which nothing's been done now rust is correct that it is owned by  midway and that metro transit on a parcel as well a part of that but what he leaves out is that metro transit is a government entity for which we can lobby and negotiate and have conversations and call out and hold in do lots of things to raise the issue in fact the city and metro transit and r k midway commissioned a study with the urban adventures group of denver they came out and they released a report they studied enough and offered a lot of options that could be done with the site and release that report last july of two thousand and fourteen since that time the city has done nothing it hasn't brought for the findings it's put it on a website it hasn't brought for the fight findings had any hearings and the reality is although the report states that there is more more expense than value that assumes you're going to do it all at one time it's a fifteen to twenty year project if we started ten years ago we'd almost been done so i think the city has a lot of ability to leverage things and that site there are many opportunities midtown marketplace like minneapolis could go there a tech order something similar to the shops of st louis park there are a lot of options if we actually just talk to people and discuss it thank you it's just th i think the most important issue facing ward four is the most important issue facing the city which is this issue of growing inequality and racial disparities and it's not unique to ward four i think in many ways ward four is  better off than then more than much of the city and seeing a lot of investment and growth and housing opportunities and jobs and i think that the number one issue in the city right now is how are we going to get more people into better paying work more people better prepared for those jobs and ready for success in our city our school district is seventy two percent kids of color and some eighty plus percent free and reduced lunch and those kids are our future employees our future business leaders our future so the council members and i know that we agree on this we've got to do a lot more to make sure that all members of our community are successful as a city what can we do i think the place we have to start is actually  as the city as an employer city employs almost three thousand people we've been working on programs department by department to try and create ladders of opportunity for people in our community institutional racism is a big deal and it's real and it's not intentional in many cases but when in a minute as an example when your fire department has always been kids of firefighters getting jobs in the fire department and word of mouth being the way that people get jobs you end up with a fire department that continues to be mostly white just as an example  and i think we have to continue to work on that issue first and foremost for our city to really be more successful than it is today thank you i'd like to rebut i also thought we were going to flip the questions that they would go to instead of they're all going to me first i thought we were going to flip them just as an aside i agree with russ that equality and inequity addressing that is the most important issue i was talking more about what the focus has been i don't think the soccer stadium should be the most important issue but it gets at equity because when you create opportunity in the ward you have an opportunity to equity i think the biggest way to address equity is to creating jobs if you want to live people lift people out of poverty you need to provide jobs for them you need to provide a way out and it's nice that during the election year russ is talking about equity work and how important it is i would ask him to talk about what he's done in the last eight years because i've seen very little evidence of russ having made equity a central part of his council office i can tell you what i've done i've worked for a mortgage foreclosures i've lobbied for got gun violence issues against gun violence at the capitol i organized a basketball tournament the early ninety's that was all about equity in bringing people together i continue to work on that housing issues are about equity broadband is very much about equity and so i would love to have him work on equity and job creation i just haven't seen it happen thank you   i've co chaired a group called the big picture project that has set aggressive targets for affordable housing along the green line at a time when the cities are actually being criticized for billing affordable housing because people think that there's already enough affordable housing in the city i've gone out of my way to say no we need more affordable housing along the green line in st paul because if anything we expect rents to start going up along this corridor and if we don't go the affordable housing in now it's going to be too expensive later second jobs in the midway there's been a lot of push to convert a lot of property in the midway from industrial to housing and i've actually taken a strong stance to make sure that the whole industrial area in the mid way that much of it remains commercial industrial space so that we can actually have the place to bring some of those jobs  back bringing jobs back is not a simple thing and we don't do a very good job of it in st paul we need to do more of it proactively i've been talking about this from day one it may not be in the conversations that tom's been listening to but this is i served on the t one i've got my grandmother in law is moving into the ward next week over admissable homes and and on a fixed income and i think couple of issues one if they still own their home i think one of the issues tends to be property and that being one of the major expenses as a lot of their other expenses have come have had been reduced one of the things we've been trying to do is to keep a little bit of a lid on property taxes they have been going up but through the recession frankly as our aid from the state declined dramatically there was this real balancing act of trying to maintain a reasonable level of services while keeping property taxes moderate and they're not low but there are still moderate compared to a lot of cities so that's one i also think we need to do more in terms of transportation options for our seniors right now and some of the folks from hammond highrise are here tonight and they've been saying we need we need better transit options to the highrise unfortunately when the when the buses were riveted for the green line there was no bus route that made sense going all the way up pamela because it doesn't go through past pierce butler out there was no good route essentially and so i do think we have to start working on what are the one of the next level of services that some of our seniors could use in terms of that trip to the grocery store it may not be a traditional transit route and folks like that haven't we elders who who recruit volunteers to do this work in our community are really critical to this work moving forward  think we have an aging population in st paul the overall were a pretty young city a lot of our seniors are actually as they age out they're moving out of town because we don't have enough options for senior housing and so one of the things we have to keep doing is investing in affordable so i want to politely suggest that talking about solutions and doing are very different i actually met with residents at the hammond high rise recently they talked about the lack of bus route how it's real problem that there aren't a lot of stores around them that they need to go get down to university ave other locations they don't have a bus they can get metro mobility but it's three dollars each way if you're on a fixed income that can add up and so the question isn't what we can't do it's what we can do what kind of pressure can we bring on metro transit to get a solution what kind of effort can the city make to solve the problem not i get two minutes not one i'm not  sorry so so i think we have to if we have to push to get a solution and not talk about the fact that l g a cuts local government aid that happened two thousand and three it was a big trauma but it was twelve years ago we have to adjust so i'll tell you a difference that i think's pretty significant between russ and myself we built a ballpark for the saints and end up costing seventy million dollars the saints put in two million the saints get all the revenue this  have a ten million dollars deficit the city is proposing a two percent property tax increase to close it now how is that possible in a city that knows what contracts it has and knows what are we paying out how do you end up one year you're spending all this money on a i would say a highly dubious investment and the next you've got a deficit that to me is not budget planning it's budget want to one you should be able to solve it as a business man who spent fifteen years though those are things that just boggle the mind of seniors are being taxed out of their home and saying we should do better is not enough we need to stop pursuing projects that don't bring benefits to all and then having the burdens fall on the rest of us to solve them that's you have to solve problems not just talk about them and that's what i would work to do is actually solve problems and keep pushing a weapon and pushing until we get a solution that solves the problems thank you rebuttal yeah i actually agree with most of what tom said other than the part where he said that i wasn't working on the solutions and in fact i think he and i enjoy the same things in a way which is which is problem solving ai you're right i haven't found a solution for the folks that have one highrise it doesn't mean i haven't been working on it the first thing i did was have a conversation with some of the other senior housing providers in the area to see hey is there any opportunity where you could use your shuttles to go over the high rise and help people out with rides they haven't figured out a way to do that yet they're still talking about it we haven't found that solution we're still working on it in fact there's a meeting next week to talk further about some of these options the opportunities there are challenging sometimes and you have to keep working through them and that's what that's what that's what we're doing because the question was about affordable housing for seniors and affordable living i'm not going to talk about the the saints ballpark right now but i do think that there's an opportunity for us to keep doing better for seniors and we have to because there's our population is aging in place thank you do i get to rebut so i'm sorry to interject this stadium but it's relevant because there's only so much money that a city has to invest and when you make like that and spend so much time of the city the the amount of time they went into that project it was the number one capital project for six years you can't do that well you shouldn't be doing that if you're really going to be focused on seniors and many other issues and i would say that we have so much focus on downtown development and building things that we're not solving the everyday problems city government needs to be commonsense solutions to everyday problems not cuttings not shiny new buildings actually working to make people's lives better i don't deny it all that russ is working on it but the question is if you're not working to a solution and you can't get to a solution that solve these problems then you need to step aside and let someone else do it because i think people need to have solutions it's not enough to talk and say you're trying samples as it were going to make an effort where we could be doing better that's not enough you have to do better thank you ok switching now to gun violence what can we do on a municipal level to cut back on gun violence or are your hands tied by higher governmental bodies who if if the murdering of young children is not enough to get this country to get serious about stopping gun violence and i'm not saying what the solution is but to do something to end gun violence in our cities then i don't know what will and i i can't profess to know on a municipal level precisely what we can do right now with the laws in so much flux but leadership is one thing and i've demonstrated that because i spent all of the spring of two thousand and thirteen up at the legislature lobbying and i'm sorry to say that while we had a lot of people on the republican side they were adamant about not doing anything we also had a failure of leadership from our democratic leaders who were not willing to bring bills forward and actually get up and down votes because the kind of you know have that vote and be held accountable and i think on a municipal level the first thing you need to do is talk about solutions and what you're going to do to try to regulate  it and sometimes you have to be willing to take on a loss a lawsuit if the issue is is important enough we have to do something to address gun rights but it has to be more than just addressing gun laws it has to be making sure that kids don't turn to violence that they're not so hopeless that that's that's what we see that kids don't believe they have a future and that gets back to what we're doing in the educational sector what we're doing to partner businesses and organizations with schools so kids have more hope but obviously getting the guns out of people's hands has to be a priority and i'm not going to claim in two minutes that i can tell you the solution i am a lawyer and i'm used to doing a lot of research and studying on these issues i think there are things that we can do but precisely what we can do with everything in flux with recent supreme court decisions is something that i can't kind of figure out tonight here yeah given given the second amendment rulings that we see in the last ten fifteen years it's a challenging issue to be effective on the strongest local gun laws in that period time i believe for washington d c their laws were largely thrown out in court and so while tom right sometimes you have to take a stand and do something even if it's going to be thrown out in court it sometimes doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time energy and money to do something that is not going to hold up if it's not going to be effective i also hope tama hold himself to the same thinner he's holding me to in terms of working on an issue and it's not it's not enough just to say we're going to work on it i think we have to we have to talk about real solutions i just want to make sure there's not a double standard there i do think that gun access is  issue i've heard officers talk about this issue with kids in our high schools who have told them that it's easier for them to get their hands on a weapon than it is to get their hands on drugs in some cases the just that excessive well we are pulling more guns off the street our department than ever before far and away the police department cannot keep up with the amount of guns that are out there on the street so everything that we can do to limit access would be the thing to focus on it probably is not a city level law that's going to change this it probably needs to be state level and then held up in the courts federally so it is a challenging issue but i think that the answers are actually clear make it harder for people to get ahold of guns because in those moments where things get heated if a gun is excessive all things go much worse and and and deaths happen much more frequently as opposed to what may have been a fistfight thirty years ago  and i want to say i think this is an issue russ and i agree and i don't think there's a lot the city can do i actually think st paul does as good a job as it can to try to you know reduce violence in terms of what you can do legally from a gun perspective i do want to clarify that when you say working on the issue talking about it i spent three months at the legislature as an unpaid citizen activists working on bills trying to pull out testifying so i want to make it clear that why i may alone have not been able to overcome an intransigent democratic leadership in republican i was there working one of the few people that was working tirelessly without pay to try to get change so i i'm not sure what the reference was to but i would be happy to talk about all the projects that i have done in the last few years as an unpaid citizen advocate working on issues important to the community like a rebuttal just real brief with the reference was to y statement tom that if you're working on an issue but not succeeding you should get out of the way clear clearly there are issues that we all work on and don't necessarily succeed in the short run and frankly success comes with the perseverance  it's one of my strengths i think fair enough sort of delayed so we'll have a few delayed responses this week thank you both mr stark will answer this one first the question is with the recent shootings mental health services are a topic of conversation are mental health services adequate in st paul and if not what will you do to improve them mental health services in st paul are nowhere near adequate not even close we don't have a single mental health bed inpatient bed and ramsey county today the few inpatient beds in the whole region are  county thirty years of thirty thirty plus years ago when president reagan basically made huge changes to mental health and essentially eliminated most of the funding for inpatient hospitals  it created a ripple effect of issues that we're still living with today in terms of people with mental health issues either being homeless not on the street not getting the services they need it's it's frankly because the issue of health and mental health resides mostly with state and county resources it's not an issue the city can effectively deal with on its own however there's a there's actually been this group of folks meeting on this topic the mayor's been co chairing on this issue and ramsey county trying to figure out ways that we can better get our arms together around the issue talk about it more and and effectively asked for some change at the at the state and federal level it's a huge issue right now and i think the i forget the percentage of folks who are homeless in the twin cities today for whom mental health issues are are a component of that of that status but it's a very large percentage  and at the end of the day we are figuring out ways to try to house the homeless we are figuring out ways to deal with people from a criminal justice perspective where the underlying if issue is really a mental health issue we're spending far more resources as a society than we frankly need to be because we thought we could save a few dollars a mental health services it's an issue that we have to work on by building support for a larger level of government to deal with that we can't deal with  wrong i think this is a thorny issue and i think russ is correct the closing of this mental health centers by ron reagan against offices had a ripple effect for the last thirty five years as we know we didn't talk about homeless people in the one nine hundred seventy s there were certainly hobos and people hopping trains and people that probably we just didn't see because we chose not to see them but not on the level that it is and many of them are veterans and so one of the issues we have to do could be a rebuttal to the veterans administration recently has done a good job a better job of housing veterans housing homeless veterans and so that's one area because so many homeless are veterans where where the federal government has actually been doing a better job i think it's a coordination of services while there may not be beds here i think the city and the county you know a lot of this falls on the counties the city in the county the city needs to push the county and everybody needs to push each other again to solve this problem to get a solution it's great to study it and have task force and talk about it but i think having worked on a four as an affordable housing advocate i think it's been studied and talked about a lot i think the solutions are there i think there's a need for we should be looking at more subsidies for housing so people can get into housing but i also think we need to look at the mental health issue we have to stop the shootings of mentally ill people it's not a knock on cops but it is a fact that we have to stop the shootings when tasers came out we were told that's what it would do you taste someone and it would reduce the violence reduce killings that could have been two minutes but and now tasers are i think i'm going to leave that one there was just going to get you guys to stay on here now we're going to start again with mr goldstein this time and this is his first question so it's two minutes ok do you support the use of police body cams in the city of st paul why not yes i do i think accountability is a really important thing and not just as it pertains to police i think this city is heavily lacking in accountability i will again refer people to what i call the unspoken state of the city you can see all the ways in which the city has not been accountable some of the things that have happened to what i call the botching of the black crossings if the city wanted to make a change at that location and they're within their right to do that there is no way it should have ever ended with an eight hundred thousand dollars settlement period and the fact that there was no public outcry to me there was no comments from the council nobody willing to say we have really made a mistake here we have to do better when there was a collapse in lily dale and two children died and information was provided the parks that arguably warned of the hazard there was no sense that anything had done been done wrong was just a terrible tragedy and no one is to blame too often when this when the state took over the city's health inspections that is a red flag that something is not working well but what do we hear l g a cuts from two thousand and three we keep hearing money is a solution these are management issues these are lack of accountability issues you know it starts at the top the mayor is starts with the mayor but if the mayor is not going to be the one accountable for ryan leadership the city council has to step into the breach and do it so i think that we have the schools are heavily accountable at least there's all sorts of measures i don't know what accountability measures we'd have in the police department i've been trying to find out in terms of measurable goals we need more measurable need transparency in the city we need a scorecard so that we know everything that's happening in the city and we don't have to wade through web pages after way pages of documents so yes symbolically body cameras is great for the city it's also very important all the reasons that people have been pushing to have them for years two minutes for mr starr yes i support by the cameras i've been raising it as an issue for the last couple of years we've got  some funds from the federal government actually to pilot a body camera program next year the primary issue with the cameras is not the cameras themselves but it's what you do with the data and there needs to be state legislation that clarifies who has access to that footage and data it's a tremendous amount of footage that you have to keep and for what period time do you keep it who gets to see it there are issues of privacy in terms of someone being caught up on the on the camera who may not want to be seen by someone who may be out to get them later  that are really important issues to be worked through clearly i think it's in communities where they've been implemented there is a positive impact in terms of the reduction and complaints against police and that's something i think we can we can all support  think we need to do a lot more though in terms of our police department i think i think we do have one of the better departments around but i think we have to keep working on things like the escalation training our department actually has done that with all of its officers but i think we have to keep reinforcing that we've got keep making sure that our chief is frankly firing off officers who are involved in incidents that are clearly outside of the bounds of what's reasonable what they've been trained to do and what's legal some of that actually has been going on i'm not sure why we don't talk about it more i think there's a little bit of this hush hush thing is just like we take care of it we fire someone it's done i think we should be talking about it more the city actually just commissioned a study of its police civilian internal affairs review commission and that report is coming back soon the question there is whether one of the questions there is whether or not to continue to have police officers serve on that commission or if it should be fully civilian and what powers it should have it was actually a groundbreaking thing when st paul did it some twenty years ago or  so but there's a full review of that going on really important so the body camera issue is just sort of scratching the surface of this issue that tom rightly refers to as accountability within the department thank you result so i'm going to again politely rebut and say i don't know what kind of police department we have i know a lot of good officers i know some that i don't think of very good but the truth is we don't know we have all sorts of anecdotal information we're not actually measuring outcomes that i'm aware of and for that matter when we say we're the most livable city in in the in america what is i mean we're not measuring you should be able to measure and say we are the best police force or we are forced because we have met all of these objectives we've reduced violent crime or we've we've reduced force events we've reduced shooting of civilians some real measures that we can look at same with the city we can talk about all these a lot of goals but are we we're going to reduce poverty cut it in half in five years in twenty four percent to twelve percent none of that's there and i would challenge rush to produce some statements because i haven't seen any and maybe i missed them where he's actually spoken out publicly about these concerns because what's talked about in closed rooms the public needs to know that things are being addressed and from what the city council doesn't say you wouldn't know that they're speaking out against any of this thank you everybody all i think tom's conflating a couple of issues here one is the settlements that sometimes happen when there is an incident and the and the city is settling with a party who was aggrieved oftentimes actually part of the settlement is that we can't talk about it and it's and it's i'm not an attorney but it is apparently a common piece of both parties agreeing to these things these days that you're not supposed to talk about the details behind it unfortunately and so we feel like if we were to talk about it more we're potentially outside of the bounds of what we're what we're so i think i just did make a public statement about the issue so i'm confused that i haven't made public statements about the issue and i do think it's an issue we have to keep talking about more  frankly it's a sensitive issue because i think there's a lot of good work happening in our department that goes unrecognized and the highlighting tends to be of the incidents that go poorly and so it's a there's a real need for continued balance in that conversation thank you mr stark we'll have you start with this question do you support repealing spitting and lurking laws in the city of st paul why or why not  i could definitely support repealing spitting in lurking laws i don't think it's actually a big problem right now in that i don't think i've heard of an incident where someone has been cited for spitting or lurking any time in the in in my time in office minneapolis just prominently you know removed their laws so it's one of those things where yeah we could absolutely take it off the books i don't think our officers are actually using those using those ordinances as reasons for arrests which is a good thing i've not read the statute on spitting and lurking so i don't know what it says in st paul i didn't didn't even know we had one  so if in fact we do have a spitting and lurking law similar to minneapolis repeal with thing which would seem appropriate but i will use my remaining time to to respond to something that russ said which he said well he's speaking out now i think the point is that it's an election we're here in a debate in october and now you're speaking out but specifically i'm not referring to settlements where yes you were constrained to comment on the settlements because it could open the city up to liability what i'm referring to is things like the police was mishandling evidence the city's solution was to spend a million dollars on pumping it into the lab rather than sitting around saying maybe we shouldn't have a police lab or maybe we need to audit the lab before we nearly spent a million dollars in fact some of the some of the members some of the city council member said i'm not really comfortable voting on this because we've had so little information but yet they voted to approve it anyway when the state took over the city's health inspections it was about money that there wasn't enough money no it was about incompetent management nobody said we're not managing health inspections correctly and when the state needs to come in and take over our health inspections that is a pretty serious red flag again we heard we don't have enough money and when when the when the park collapse happened before a settlement had before there had been a settlement there was certainly the opportunity to call for investigations and talk about whether parks and rec was really managing properties correctly none of that so it's not about what legally you permit it to do it's what you're willing to say publicly what you're willing to do to go on the record because there are real problems with st paul i'm sorry to say that because they don't want to just look for problems but if you don't identify problems they just continue to fester and whenever i hear money i just point to the saints ballpark the penfield project the palace theater innovation that's one hundred  fifty million dollars right there without any public discussion and it's going to be spent to like three times yeah just briefly on the on the police lab issue which was clearly a major issue tom's characterization is just incorrect i think sometimes the information communicated to the public is not the same as actually what's going on and i think that's partly our fault sometimes we don't do a very good job of  communicating communicating what the city is working and what steps are being taken i am not the most outspoken person i i'm not the most outspoken person i'm actually fairly shy person but and so sometimes i really take a step back and say what are we actually doing how is the issue being addressed and if i feel if i feel if i find that the right steps are being taken i'm not going to go out and say hey the right steps need to be taken because in fact they are from my perspective  the often if if for some reason i found that they were not being taken there are probably some times where i should be more outspoken and it's not my it's not my natural state thank you i do respect that i'm not suggesting you should just go off half cocked and blurt something out but i don't have any inside knowledge everything that i'm telling you is based on articles i've read in the in the true star tribune in pioneer press what was said there i haven't you know i don't have any internal documents i'm not claiming that what might have gone behind the scenes i'm saying what was reported to the public and what was quoted by council members i am basing everything on that so there were no public statements made to the media about any of the issues that i discuss i think that the idea that the public's getting misinformation i don't think scrag i think the state took over the health department you can go online and read all about it i'm not going into rat droppings and all the kinds of things they cited to show how incompetent the effort was  may have had something to do with money but it had more to do with management you don't if you're managing and you know you have a problem you say we need more money for health inspections and we can't build this stadium because this is where the money needs to go so i mean that's the kind of accountability then talking about that's the kind of speaking not just speaking out to speak out i'm talking about really addressing the problems that are happening in the city thank you mr goldstein this question will go to you first what steps will you take to terror transparency in government well i think i've talked about some of them already if you if you look at my literature you will see where i clearly discussed that because i think it's very important the first thing is to the extent i could repeal it i would vote i would reverse the decision to eliminate the holding of emails for the last for only six months that to me makes no sense i'm not aware of any storage issue that the city is having with electronic data so the idea that we're going to vote to the council voted unanimously to only hold e mails for six months now maybe there are certain e mails but giving them the discretion decide which emails they should keep i think that that's wrong and that goes against everything that's transparent i think the reason it happened is they're getting tired of reports being written about problems in the city and this is one way to sort of keep it quiet i think those who have researched stuff and produced information particularly with the park with the park collapse have been have revealed some of the machinations going on behind the scenes but let's talk more closely about transparency why do we decide to do all these things without public hearings why was the sense ballpark the only public hearing was a chance to come in and say you oppose the vote everything was done behind closed doors the recent decision with the palace theatre where the city sold forty million dollars worth of bonds for eighty vitality which i support but twenty percent of that was in diverted to the palace theater because that's the that's the mayor's pet project sure it would be great to have another met music another music venue in downtown but it's going to be almost fifteen million of public money and a private venue is going to benefit the same way t benefiting with a two million dollar investment there seems to be no interest in having public meetings because this is the way we've always done it the city council let's have the public can gauge let's listen to the public let's talk to them and let's not let's not hide behind rules like we're going to live in a data so people can explore it and it for us wants to explain it away that's fine but that's the public's perception i can tell you that thank you it's just our transparency i recently became council president and one of the things i've been working on is how to make the councils process itself a bit more transparent i think people a lot of people who come down to testify at city council on various issues are looking fused about the process and so we've been trying to communicate better to folks what the process is what to expect when you come in terms of the city overall i actually am a really big supporter of this idea of open data we haven't we haven't moved towards it very well yet and st paul many apple has passed something in the last couple of years they're just starting to sort of release lots of data sets actually really agree with tom on this issue largely i think we need to do a better job of making more of our city information more transparent i do think that the email storage issue there the primary issue there is actually that two things one when we get data practices requests from the city which we increasingly get we are required to produce everything that's asked for so that maybe thousands or even tens of thousands of e mails that may include a certain word in them and the simple act of trying to fulfill that request has become a pretty significant city  operation and so a part of what was behind the e mail change was to simplify the rules about e mail to actually force employees to get things out of sitting in their e mail box and to someplace where they actually should be stored rather than just using e mail as essentially their file folder  the the second issue there is that for a while we actually use the state as our home for our e mail system when we brought it back internal that actually did become a serious issue of both storage and managing that information and i i get it that it seems like we're trying to eliminate information that was not the underlying rationale behind behind what was done and in fact we do not have we do not have control over which e mails are kept or not they are all kept for the a lot of period of time regardless as to whether or not we happen to keep them ourselves individually thank you you know i'm sorry but i just don't find that answer acceptable i don't think there is a capacity issue with storing e mail i think that you know the way the black bear crossings litigation was handled the the negotiations to me show a city that's not you know the way the city attorney's office handled it i mean it's just to me deplorable it's not about whether that venue was successful or not it's a fact if you want to change things univariate clear professional manner and you know the behind the scenes stuff reveal a lot of mistakes and missteps and i'm concerned that data won't be available in the future so the city won't have to reveal that so you can't hold the city accountable but the other thing is why are we always trailing minneapolis yes many apps is doing a lot of the open government why are we waiting for them many apps is doing more about broadband why are we sitting back and not doing anything about that we just did a ten year deal with comcast a no bid contract four hundred thousand dollars a year how is that a transparent thing when we don't even put it out for bits it's just i just have to disagree that we're we're just in transparency thing in st paul it's dark would you like to read not sure transparency is a tricky thing in that on the black be specifically i would say a big part of the problem was the lack of transparency on the front end when the contract was originally written it was a it was a problematic contract and one that was not transparent and one that there was not the was not consistent with other contracts across the city and so in an ironic way the transparency problem happened probably fifteen years ago more so than it did in the present time and i agree with tom that we should not be trying minneapolis on this there is a cost to actually both organizing and releasing that data and it hasn't at this point risen to the surface of things that we've decided to spend limited city resources on i tom tom's response will be we're spending it on stadiums i understand that there are there are a couple of examples such as the penn field where i disagreed with some of those major projects that were that we spend money on in some cases though we have to keep investing in order to keep attracting frankly people to the city our last question tonight we'll go to mr stark first and it it is what is the most pressing environmental issue facing this ward and what steps will you take to address it i mean the most pressing environmental issue facing this ward and our society and our on our world i would say is as climate change and how we are either contributing to the solution or being part of the problem my one of clearly one of my big focuses and office has been around the transportation aspects of trying to reduce emissions one of the things i would like to focus on and i am focusing on currently but also in the next term is our solid waste issue in the city in terms of the issues of the city touches after transportation and energy in our own buildings i think solid waste is the area where we can have the most impact we've been working to improve our recycling program it's been slower work than we had all hoped but by twenty seventeen we will be moving to household collection of organics i personally believe we should also be moving to organize trash collection in st paul it's the third rail of city politics nobody likes to talk about it but it's really inefficient the way we do things now a lot more pollution a lot more wear and tear in our streets the fact that we have five six ten companies on any given block providing trash service we also pay twice as much as our neighbors  minneapolis roseville and people would for our trash collection because it's so inefficient for the for the pollers to do it that way so that's an issue i hope i am focusing on right now in terms of my work and hope to see some major improvements over the so russ recently talked that the two of his main issues are climate change and growing inequality and i agree those are both important issues and i i don't disagree with with really any steps he's talking about i would go further and say that we should look to ban styrofoam and look to ban plastic shopping bags because they are known to break into particular matter and end up in the oceans and create all sorts of environmental hazards there but i i would also say that it's it's somewhat ironic to me and i don't i don't mean that in a facetious way that we he is focused on climate change i think is a good thing but one of the most environmentally friendly things you can do is to keep the buildings you have the greenest buildings that we have are the ones in the ground the amount of c o two and other pollutants that we're likely released when we tore down the gillette products building downtown in order to build the saints ballpark i suspect that russ is going to have to ride his bike for the next twenty years just to everywhere just to try to make up for that because that is a huge emission and every time we tear down a building and build a new one and mix all the cement and transport and do all the things we talk about though those least the huge impacts on the environment i'm not suggesting we stop building things but the reality is when you talk about climate change as an important thing and you don't look at the full full spectrum of what the impacts are i think it just undoes it and so that's that is one of the main reasons why i oppose projects because they move for without considering the whole range of impacts and that you let building was a sol concrete building with a huge amount of waste below and we've now all just put that into the atmosphere and so it sort of undermines making climate change your agenda if you're going to support projects like that in all seriousness you everybody all yeah i i actually authored and sponsored the city's green building green building policy that requires us to set a really high standard for energy efficiency in new buildings when they are constructed if they're city money going into them i agree with tom that an existing building is is from an environmental perspective something that's worth preserving at a time when the city was actually demolishing a lot of houses during the foreclosure crisis i worked on that issue and made sure that there were that those issues were being looked at that at least at the very least in the course of demolition we were requiring  salvage of materials the issue of specifically is one that people are interested in and in some neighborhoods around town it's one i'm interested in too and the problem at this point is that we haven't identified a tool in order to preserve more of the structures that we have that may happen story value other than historic preservation and we have work to do in that area thank you everybody so quick thing you want to stop tear downs you find a way to stop them period it's not interesting do the work we've been doing the work for the last year and a half with historic human village and if we'd had a council member who said i agree with you hamlin you need to be a better neighbor new take care your property so we don't in a position where we're facing tear downs that would be a big step towards a solution but with regard to the saints ballpark it was a gigantic concrete building i mean i don't know how many tons enormous number of tons of concrete that were were had to be taken down that released all that c o two and then seven million dollars spent on pollutants to take care the soil because the city when it bought the property didn't insist on a hold harmless clause that every developer does which says the seller of the building is going to be responsible for the contamination so it undermines everything you're trying to do when you don't connect the dots and pay attention all the details and as a lawyer and a businessman i assure you i pay attention to details and as a community activist get out and do the work thank you very much all right let's just start you can begin your closing statements well i just want to thank everyone for coming out tonight this is been fun and i mean that actually kind of i enjoy this i think tom does too so we're going to be a traveling road show here that's for the next few weeks which i look forward to the issues and same poll right now our big issues are important issues i actually congratulate and thank tom for running and joining the race and i mean that sincerely welcome i think when when local races are not opposed there's not this opportunity to have this good discussion about issues sometimes i'm always happy to have these i do think that as i mentioned earlier and tom restated the two big issues facing our community are climate change and inequality i'm going to remain focused on those issues if anything more focused on the inequality issues than i have been on the path that i have been in the past because i think finally the city is getting to a point where we're seeing a lot of growth and investment in our community that we haven't seen in a long time our population is growing jobs are finally growing again and the key issue frankly is going to be making sure that our residents are able to take advantage of these new opportunities economically and in terms of being a part of our community for the for the long run i think st paul's a great place i've actually been here sixteen plus years which basically means i moved in last week as far as st paul is concerned but it's it's quickly become home and i look forward to more opportunities to talk to all  tonight and thanks for coming out so i appreciate the you know passionate discussions are often rare in st paul in minnesota because we all know why the unspoken so i appreciate the opportunity i'm obviously passionate about a lot of things i personally like russell a lot and you know i appreciate the conversation we've had so it's you know it's not always pleasant when you have to you're running against someone and you have to talk about issues and and often you know you might have to cast a person in a negative light because you're not satisfied with their performance but i mean that is part of what a campaign is about and so i think what i want to leave you with is some clear distinctions between russia's record and what i would do and it will also you can find in my materials but what i want to focus on moving forward because i've talked about things that are wrong i want to do talk about things that i want to make right i want to focus on job creation in attracting cutting edge businesses to st paul i want to prioritize or city resources to rebuild our neglected infrastructure and not focus on building stadiums i want to extend the livable wage ordinance to all large st paul employers with exceptions for startups and small business i want to live rich city assets and programs to makin smiles educational outcomes for children and by that i mean partnering with businesses and organizations so you have adults coming in mentoring and helping at schools and there's an opportunity for kids to get out of the schools and see how we're going to zation and bizarre operate and get a sense of the real world and maybe find that inspiration that all of us many of us got when we were younger which many kids today don't have parents in home or single parents to provide that inspiration i want to have community owned affordable high speed internet for everyone something that unfortunately we didn't get to talk about much tonight i want complete transparency of all city department budgets contracts in tift districts and finally i want city plowing of alleys by public works it's about time thank you well on that note i'd like to thank both the candidates for a very lively discussion and thank you also to be audience for some terrific questions i believe the candidates might be available for a few minutes after we conclude if you want to talk with them directly if you have questions about your polling pay place or want to make sure you're registered to vote go to am and votes dot org thank you to the hamelin branch library for the use of their