possible tonight do not endorse or oppose any political party or candidate the purpose of the meeting is to hear each candidate's views on a variety of topics and any views expressed by any of the candidates tonight are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring organizations a little background on this position for city council council members must live in the ward they represent and are elected to four year terms the current term runs th and fifteen as in the legislative body the city council set city policy through ordinances and resolutions the council has so responsibility for adopting the city budget and performs a quasi judicial role in hearing appeals for example if a property owner wants to appeal the decision of the the city council also serves as the library board which oversees the same paul library system and also the housing and redevelopment authority h r a is another responsibility which supports housing and commercial development through loans and bond issuance council members also serve on other boards and commissions such as the st paul port authority and the water commission the council legislates bypassing ordinances which become city laws the council has also makes performance auditing decisions and monitors the operation and performance of city agencies and holds regular oversight hearings on city departments to determine how programs are working and whether budgeted funds are being spent well in its decision making roles the city council actively involves pub the public through its weekly public meeting  i think there it's on wednesday in the late afternoon before we formally begin tonight would you please turn off all cell phones to silent video taping this evening is by s b n n t v cable channel nineteen and broadcast times may be found on its website w to begin each candidate will be given up to two minutes for an opening statement the order of speaking had been determined by a drawing and after the first round cross questions will be answered in a rotation format in each candidate will be given equal time to respond following the opening statement candidates will respond to written questions from you the audience question cards will be collected from the audience and no questions of a personal nature will be permitted candidates will have two minutes to respond to questions and the order to which they respond will rotate throughout the evening then each candidate will be given two minutes for a closing statement a rebuttal if there is any is needed would be one minute no campaign signs or literature are permitted in the this room and signs or literature may be placed outside of the hall they may be brought in after the meeting is over persons wearing t shirts and slogans or political logos will be asked not to wear them inside the forum room a timekeeper will time the statements and would you just hold up here the time people will give you two prompts the first when you have thirty seconds left the second and last is when you must stop speaking a note pad and pencil is provided for each candidate and candidates are allowed to have notes but use of electronic devices is not allowed the sponsor and moderator reserve the right to ask disruptive audience members to leave please your applause until the end of the form question card used in the form become the property of the legal women voters and the form sponsors ok now we'll get started and the first candidate to speak speak with opening statement is rest start well thank you ran eight years ago on a campaign all about creating a more sustainable and livable city and i think we've made a lot of progress toward that and in that period the green line is the most obvious incarnation of that i just saw the numbers were out today that forty five thousand riders a day were riding the train in september which is well beyond the twenty thirty projections for what was expected i really want to continue to focus on issues of sustainability including transportation energy and solid waste in a third term i think we are doing pretty well in st paul but there's a lot of work still to do in some ways we have an exciting time in the city and that we are growing in population and jobs for the first time in a long time we we believe we've exceeded three hundred thousand people according to the most recent surveys for the first time in decades and i think the flipside of that is that in spite of our growth and success not everyone is experiencing that growth and success equally and we have a lot of work to do to make sure that more of our lower income residents and our residents of color enjoy the benefits of growth and success that many parts of the city are starting to see that there are a number of ways we can do that and i'm sure we'll get into those  later in the evening i've lived in hemet midway for the last sixteen years live a couple blocks from university avenue and it's been a great community to be a part of one of the interesting things about w four is the diversity of the neighborhoods and and how different they are but also how much a part they are of the great city of st paul just briefly wanted to mention that big initiative last year was actually to restore evening library hours at some of the branches including this one and i just got my key to cute stop so i will thanks i am thanks everyone for coming as well i i think there are vast differences in the way that russ and i approach this race and look at the state of the city i think sustainability is important i think the issues he talked about are important but i'm more interested in the fact that we have twenty four percent of our population living in poverty including twenty five thousand children that we we we have a city that is working great for those for the for the wealthy developers for sports team owners for people who are connected to the city but not so great for the rest of us recently supported a parkland education ordinance that would reduce the amount of parkland that developers would have to provide to to nearly zero which to me for especially for camille like say at any park that values its green space and as seeing some of that challenge there with the luther seminary redevelopment i think that's a pretty vital part of communities is that we preserve as much green space as possible i we're done broadband as something that is very vital to the to the community and have gotten nowhere with the city council it doesn't think that broadband access is important enough that it should be an initiative of city ironically were we were we've created a task force now in a prosecuting taskforce to look at a soccer stadium but we haven't been willing to create a task force to look at broadband which is a utility that will benefit many many more people than a soccer stadium but it's a question of priorities what i do want to work on is creating jobs which is the quickest way out of poverty i want to look at all extending a livable wage to all people in st paul that we have a transparent government that we have clear goals that we can all follow and we'll talk about that the rest of the night and including what i call my alternative state of the city which is a lot of facts that will unfortunately are inconvenient truths that we need to come to grips with as a community for really being honest about how we're doing as a city thank you by with never paying property taxes is a two part question well stadiums with tiff well tiff i think it's pretty tough to give a tiff explanation in two minutes but i'll try to stands for tax argument financing it's in theory a tool used to address play to property you have a property that sitting there that's not is a blight on the community and no one wants to improve that i pay on the increment or the difference of a property is worth a million dollars and envelop or comes in and says hey i'll redevelop that property will be worth ten million the nine million dollars would be the increment and then the property tax that would be owed on that nine million would essentially not be collected from it would not come to the city general fund instead that money would the money would be used to the city could take out a loan give the loan to the developer and the developer could then use the property taxes he or she would ordinarily page of the city to pay off the bonds on that lawn that's not precisely it but that's as close as i can give for a quick explanation unfortunately it's been dramatically abused in st paul by my calculations and it's hard to make sure they're accurate because the city doesn't do a particularly good job in putting the figures out there something i will change if elected but twenty five million dollars a year goes towards paying off to if projects doesn't come to the general fund we have buildings going back as far as loss and software which goes back to norm coleman's administration that the city long ago sold we still owe twenty five million dollars that we're paying on that and those payments cannot go to the rest of the city i have to get to the ballpark issue later but we'll have plenty of time for that we've had to request it asking the candidates to stand because the people in the back would like to see you when you're speaking the mr start for redevelopment mostly use in urban areas which it's always more expensive to develop in urban areas because of things like underground pollution and other things that make it complicated to do development in city compared to the greenfield the the thing that the tax increment has to be useful or under state law is some aspect of the development that provides public benefit and that's the part that he missed so typically that's public infrastructure streets or storm water management or parking or those kinds of things to can also be used as a as a way to underwrite the affordable component of a housing development so to create affordable units in a development that might not otherwise have them but but state law restricts our ability to used to following certain things we have a policy in st paul that no more than ten percent of our tax base can be in to fish tricks we've kept to that policy we actually bumped up to it pretty close in the last few years but we have a couple of districts coming off of the rolls in the next couple of years and so it's been a it's been a process of managing and making sure that we're using it responsibly i'm not going to say that it always been used responsibly i think a lot of the projects that were done particularly in the eighty's and ninety's when the city was particularly desperate for some development didn't pan out very well in the districts that i'm aware of that have been created over the last ten years are performing very well some of them are actually being paid off faster than anticipated and the other thing about tiff is that it has to meet the budget for test in other words but for the tax increment being invested upfront the project would not happen so many times we're faced with the choice of do we see no development at all or do we use this tool to spur development and i agree with tom there have been times when it's been used incorrectly i think we will get to the stadium  mandy because you're the first person on the next question yes one one minute rebuttal you people need need me to stand ok he's a little taller than i am  so this is going to be the first of several disagreements i think to face been terribly abused in st paul and there's no question about that i think some some very clear examples are the penfield project had to funding that as a luxury condo project on the edge of downtown with a lawn store pool jacuzzi all sorts of things in it i don't think that's the funding but more recently there's eleven million dollars in to if it's been approved for the macy's building which is not blighted it's just empty and so we're going to pull but put a practice arena for the wild in there that's how we're using our to funding on top of it the city has already passed a resolution requesting to funding for the ford site the ford site is vacant it's probably the most desirable state in the entire  entire the most desirable site in the entire state so we have abused if there are many product there are many districts that have not ended only a few have ended and i think that is one of the sources of a lot of our financial woes is ok are you ready for the next question question number two deals with district councils what role should district councils play in city decision city decision making process as especially with respect to city policy we have two questions about the same  topic i'm going to start out with fifteen seconds back on to if i voted against the penfield there is no approved deal for macy's and i oppose a need to fund a macy's if it's used for retail which is the proposal right now and so tom and i agree there on the ford site it would be needed for things like street infrastructure we just don't have other funding sources for building new streets in st paul district councils are now forty years old in the city of st paul we just had a celebration acknowledging the forty year history we can a half ago done city council and they were created to be a citizen participation model that at the time was unique in the country trying to make sure that citizens had an outlet to participate more in the decisions that the city was making they play an advisory role and oftentimes will review an issue such as a land use issue or transportation issue or whatever the issue may be and provide a recommendation either to the planning commission in some cases to the city council and it's been i think one of the things that has created a really strong set of neighborhoods in st paul and that forty year history with the with a lot of cohesion  d a lot of opportunity for people to feel like they are in fact a part of their community and have a real voice in the decisions that the city is making i think it's time for us to think about ways to reinvigorate the system the city itself also needs to think about new and better ways to engage our community outside of the district council system people are wanting to engage differently today than they did forty years ago it's actually fairly unusual to get a room full of people like this these days for community meetings people are more wanting to quickly provide input on their mobile device or at home and we're starting to move in that direction the city i think we have to do more of that and then decide how the district council system fits into our new models of community engagement tom goldstein so no disagreement on the value of district councils i've served on two myself written a macro so back in the late one nine hundred eighty s and then i'm on the family midway serve on the development committee so technically i'm not on the board of the council but i've been involved with that their independence is to me what's really important unfortunately during norm coleman's administration he sought to destroy that independence by undoing the funding i think one thing the city needs to do is to provide more funding for district council so that they're all on a level playing field some and depending on the neighborhoods that they're located  many have much better access to funding have much better resources so we're creating kind of unequal structures which just further exacerbates the inequality that we have in the city neighborhoods that are doing very well that have a lot of resources neighborhoods that are really stressed that we're not i think they're also very key to transparency because this is government from the bottom up rather than the top down unfortunately not enough ideas start the district council level and come to the city it is more  city puts out ideas and pushes them down the district councils and asked them to comment and give their suggestions when the agenda has already been determined and i think that's actually very harmful to the city and i would like there to be more independence and although the advisory bodies that we actually listen to them and fund them properly so that they can be independent and representative of neighbors i think the lack of participation just reflects that the city is not becoming more transparent it's becoming less transparent the recent decision to eliminate e mails after six months is one example of the the proposed agreement to try to to have sort of a secretive agreement around the soccer stadium that was only back back down after a few days when there was a pretty large protest i think there's too much keeping information from the public and so reviving district councils would be one way to at least help reverse that trend that's happening at city hall think you know the standing you're the first person and then brutality in st paul what steps would you take who was at whose fault is it and how will you determine that well i think that's a fairly complex topic but i'm going to be very straightforward about my response i think the first thing is that we need to have cameras police officers need to be equipped cameras so that there is no there's no confusion about what's happening yes there are some privacy issues but i think we can address them but i think all police should we should have a camera so that the really tragic things we're hearing about that happen to show up because someone has a cell phone that we minimize the chance of that happening i think the biggest problem with police brutality has to do with hiring practices and lack of accountability on this sheet that i call the alternative state of the city that many of you have there are a number of claims the city has paid out paid out for police brutality so obviously it's a problem even if we may have a good police force it's not a good enough police force that we don't have some severe problems that are leading to significant payouts and brutality claims i also think that we need to have accountability what really as a police force what are the accountability measures that we have i have talked with commanders and i've never heard any specific thing other than they kind of monitor crime and monitor number of police calls but there's no thing that says for example we want to reduce all excessive force complaints by fifty percent in two years or we want to make sure that there are zero shootings that our goal is zero shootings of course that's their goal but as a tangible thing here's how we will try to arrive at that rather than saying you know in the end some people are going to get shot it's sad but that's part of a community so to really focus on how we can reduce violence because police officers are often you know to be very honest they do lots of great work i know a lot of great cops in st paul but i also read stories where police  not handled things well and those need to be learning experiences that should be the basis for forums and training and ongoing ongoing development that i don't think is happening and that's what needs to change we need to actually have ongoing professional development on  undergoing deescalation training for all police officers which i think is a key part of what's missing frankly what i've seen in my years is that too often there would be an incident  in some cases there is video in some cases there isn't where all of us frankly question the behavior of the officers sometimes you can't know what was going on because you don't see what happened before but too often the officers were in what seemed to be a situation where they have done something incorrectly some cases unethical there's there's very few consequences because there's an ability to fall back on this is what i was trained to do  so i think we have to go take a step back and say what what are the actual techniques in the training to prevent the escalation in the first place and i know that chief smith is doing a lot in that area and i and i applaud him for it i think we've got to do more i think as a city we are lucky in that we have a department that is really focused on these issues i think the recent protests involving black lives matter have been a great example of our police department's ability to manage a group that wants to be able to have their voice heard without having situations flare up that might that might and other cities we do have a we do have a review committee called the police civilian internal affairs review commission and the mayor's office actually recently asked for an outside audit of what that commission does and how they function it was created about thirty years ago it was groundbreaking the review is looking at the structure and whether or not it still makes sense there are a couple of police officers who serve as part of that group and one of the questions being raised is should police officers be part of this review commission absolutely the at this point in time the i don't believe the city has any specific programs targeting better and so however federal federal new federal law does require that there is veteran's preference and our hiring at the city and that applies to private employers as well so there are a lot of new things in place that will make it easier for vets to get jobs  one of the related areas of course is better and homelessness and there's been a real focus on that both federally and in minnesota in recent years to the point where we've actually made a lot of progress in the state and i've heard some people in the in the field say that we may not have homeless vets a couple of years from now in the state of minnesota which would be quite an accomplishment in the area of jobs i think it's tough you got folks coming back from deployment overseas in some cases their skills don't match the jobs that are out there and certainly continuing to bolster the programs that we have in st paul st paul college and elsewhere of job training and retraining are an important component of that today the city doesn't have specific programs targeting targeting employment for  well i'm going to have to take ross's word on what what city veteran services and what the city may have in terms of it and services because i'm not i'm not familiar with what the city may have i can i can say that in a broader in a broader sense and i'm not sure if that question has to do with veterans who are homeless veterans who you know were trying to find passed back to employment who have been experiencing long term homelessness or whether we're going to veterans who have just returned in the last ten years obviously it's a huge challenge and it certainly goes well beyond a municipal challenge it is a federal challenge is a challenge for all of us because many veterans are coming back suffering from p s p t s d they've had horrendous injuries you know traumatic brain injuries the whole the whole gamut and so even if they have the skills the fact that they have these injuries are probably very often going to keep them from going back to jobs that we had so i think the first thing we have to do is be compassionate we have to be empathetic and understand there are many people in our midst who we need to serve that don't have the you know the the same sort of advantages that we do as a result of their experience and i think it just goes to jobs in general as a city unfortunately we do not have a comprehensive plan  which to in which to create jobs the jobs that we seem to create are just construction projects that's the main thing we do we're still lagging behind from the great recession according to two years ago n p r s talked about this same paul was lagging behind five thousand the recovery minneapolis a completely recovered and so it's the fact that we don't have jobs for people in general and young people and and people in poverty let alone for veterans that i think exacerbates our ability to deal  so it's a there's a lot that we have to do not just to serve veterans but to serve anyone else and use relationships with the state and federal level to remote whatever we can in the way of job training retraining and it's cetera thanks ok next question mr goldstein name one city st paul sponsored initiative that you would like to support assuming office current initiative initiative is all it says i mean i'm not i mean i'm not sure which one i'd like to support i'd like to make a lot of them better  i i mean i guess all i can do is talk about what what i want to see happen as a as a city and hopefully that will get at the questioner's what the questioner is asking what i want to see us do is extend a livable wage ordinance i guess you could say that is something we have it just applies to businesses who are doing business with the city or contracting with the city i'd like to see that extended to all large employers so exception for small employers and start ups  i'd like to us to leverage city resources the existing resources we have to better serve education so that we're making sure that every school in st paul has a business partner i know that  murray has a partner with h a partnership with h p fuller three m has a partnership with dayton's bluff but there are not enough consistent partnerships with businesses and organizations and and and community you know faith community with schools and i think that's a way for adults to come in and mentor and provide provide a path for kids to see what the world is like and also a chance for kids to come out of those business organizations and see what real world is which may help them with some inspiration that they may not be getting at home particularly if their kids living in poverty or kids are coming from one or no parent families and being raised by a grandparent who is so busy just trying to keep their head above water that they can't mentor the way that t pick two parent families can and i also think that we need to use our tax policies wiser so that we're not unduly burdening small businesses or homeowners but i'm sure russ can speak better with programs that he believes is are doing very well one of the reasons i'm wondering why i'm running is because i don't think enough of our programs are doing as well as they  should i do want to speak about some existing programs but ones that i think we have to expand upon i mentioned that i think the biggest challenge in the city right now is extending the benefits of our of our growth and success in some pockets to the rest of our community i think the first thing that the city can do in that area is to think of ourselves first as the large employer that we are if you count the water department we've got nearly thirty two hundred employees at the city of st paul and we have to create more ladders of opportunity to good paying jobs within the city for our residents of color and low incomes today only twenty percent of city employees are people of color and the city's adult population is forty percent people are close we've got a lot of work to do in that area we've seen some progress particularly in the fire department in recent years with the creation of what's called the e m s academy which is essentially breaking down some of those barriers to entry by training kids to get their e m t certification for free and actually providing the mistype and while they're doing it and then they can get a job as a fire safety cadet transporting people from the hospital who are leaving the hospital and while they're doing that can go back to  school get their firefighter training and eventually get into the department we've got a look department by department of this is what we're doing to try and create those ladders of opportunity to make sure that we are not just doing better job of recruiting but actually  specifically targeting our young adults of color and low income to try and get them into these city jobs the other program that i'm excited about that is growing used to be disks called our summer youth job corps program or summer youth job program it's not called right track and it's a program internships that we do both as a city but also a lot of our private employers in the city have joined that program and they're taking on high school kids mostly kids of color for internships in the summer  that in many cases are then leading to another internship in some cases a good paying job later one man so i think it's great that we have all those programs and we need more city employees like inspectors to make sure that we enforce the code so that we don't have landlords who are your responsible and promoting student housing and other things where they're making a lot of money and not keeping up their properties and we often hear we don't have the money to create these jobs because we have a revenue shortage so we need to look at parting the parking meters and things like that we can talk all about all these things we need to do the concern is that we haven't done that we're so focused on benefitting the few in stead of the many because of all these development deals all these giveaways the pursuit of stadiums the kinds of things that eat up the resources so that we can have all these robust programs that i could talk with you at length about how wonderful they were because a lot of our programs are not wonderful because we're not supporting them properly because we're misspending the resources we have so i'm sorry to sort of a bubble there but i think these are they're good people but they're not being well led and we need to do a better job of serving everyone and not just a few start and this question is particularly directed to mr starr regarding them the marshall avenue restoration fifteen hundred to two thousand people signed a petition against the third phase of the marshall ave greens green street proposal you say you are a good listener who did you listen to when you decided to  community led initiative by a lot of the neighbors along marshall avenue in marion park now considered part of union park that started probably ten twelve years ago and the idea was to try and make marshall  more pedestrian and bicycle friendly street the part of that was to try to install some of those planted medians that we have today on marshall as a way of both beautifying the street calming traffic  and in the bike lanes and creating safer crossings at the intersections where most were many people cross there the project wasn't ever fully completed my predecessor actually voted to finance the first piece of it i came into office and the last piece that's being referred to here was a short section of median at the corner of marshall and wilder right by izzy's and copland's coffee and those businesses right near cleveland and we prioritized that intersection for another median segment because so many people cross the street there while they're trying to get back and forth to those businesses and so while there there certainly was opposition in the community to having another median there there was also quite a bit of support and to me it boiled down to safety and trying to make a safe crossing for people trying to get to those businesses a clevelander marshal so i was not aware that this issue was as hot a topic as it was many years after the fact until i was out door knocking in in the community and found so many people that even though the media had already talked about being planned we're still opposed to it and i thought boy i sure got this wrong i thought everybody was happy with it and you know there was a public process and there's a public process for many years but there's a way you can conduct a public process in which it's pretty clear what direction it's going and the people that are supporting it could be very loud and making it clear that others that don't agree are not welcome and that after a while you stop showing up so pretty much the public process seems to be eighty ninety hundred percent of the people there support it i think that seems to be part of the element that happened there  seems to be just the opposite with grand avenue meters where everybody's against it in the city council mare for it but i think that what i see now is we have a median that doesn't do what was supposed to be done if traffic calming and i think having safe crossings is important so you stripe it and you put in flashing lights that people can activate and you see if that helps with the problem if that doesn't work then you can look at median or what i would call more extensive efforts but to just put in a median and then end up creating an opening so people can turn into the liquor store which is what the people who originally pushed the median wanted not to happen there's nobody that's happy with this issue i have people that supported in or against it that are supporting me because there's so much dissatisfaction and i think it's a signal that this was not handled well and you should be really revisit it instead russ took funding from c i v and rolled it out with very little notice neighborhood and said we're going to put in this median which is really just a cause i mean and closes off a turn on to wilder and leaves an opening to turn the liquor store and they had a rebuttal i could go into more about why i think that's a really bad way to do it but how there would have been a better way to do it that i think would have made more people happier you think you know one of the lessons of this project for me is that people feel really strongly about what we do with our streets it's actually pretty remarkable the level of interest and concern and i think part of that comes from this the fact that honestly in our office the most common complaint that we get is a concern about traffic safety and people feeling unsafe crossing streets and that traffic is moving too fast so that was my primary motivation in supporting the project was to get at that issue and not just by trying something that may or may not work by actually doing the thing that our professional traffic engineer say will make people safer and will reduce crashes and that's exactly what i supported ensure everyone in st paul has equal access to quality high speed internet the other question is how do we create competitive options for residential broadband  i really appreciate that question particularly because it feels like this is actually some it's a little more related to st anthony park not many other questions have been and so i hope we have some more questions related to this community were hosting this event folks may be familiar with connects st paul which is a campaign that i co founded with a graduate student to address this exact issue we actually i actually spent two years working on this issue and it's one of the reasons why i'm running for city council because we followed all the steps we went around we talked to people in the community i talked all the city council members talked all the county commissioners they said they were in favor of better broadband access but then both entities signed deals with comcast to manage their own networks including the city which did a four million dollars deal four hundred thousand dollars a year to pay comcast to run the city's network as part of a no bid contract that is simply horrible city policy it just should never have happened that way so we don't have a solution but even though we went to we went to the d f l convention we got a resolution passed it passed with the highest amount of votes so it became part of the d f l platform even now the city has no policy to address broadband concerns our policy is comcast and i'm sure will tell you that we just we're going to a deal with century link as it as if having a do optimally is going to change anything cities like chattanooga have invested in broadband they have fiber for everyone these are the kind of projects we should be pursuing given that the school district is given every kid an i pad whether that's a good idea or not as many as a third of kids go home without internet service we have no plan to address it and there are things that we can do that don't cost money that the city could be doing right now with every construction project and i will talk about them in my  have thanks for the question just when i started on the city council i received a report of the work that had been done on this topic by the commission or committee that had been set up by one of  i and the report said that the public wi fi systems at the time were not that reliable the service wasn't very high quality and recommended against pursuing that option the option that it did propose that we take a look at was essentially fiber to the premises meaning building a fiber network across the city would get to every every building and every every household the price tag that was put on that concept at that time unfortunately was around three hundred twenty five million dollars across the city because of increased construction cross since then and then they have we're going to dramatically people are estimating that the current dollars that would be a half a billion dollar project that does not mean that it's outside of the realm of possibility it does mean that that's about the equivalent of our annual city budget i do think that provides making sure that we have good options is important i think that we have to define what the problem is first and if the problem is low income folks not having access to broadband we are working on that issue by providing higher speed service in our libraries and rec centers by providing the ability for people to actually rent the  internet at our libraries it's actually a hotspot device that people can take out and bring home it's those aren't perfect solutions but they are a step in the right direction tom has asked that we create sort of reestablish the commission there's nothing wrong with the idea of reestablishing the commission i haven't heard an idea yet that would be the thing that we would do that would make an impact on this issue so this is a this is to me a very clear distinction between having a vision for the city and not having a vision because this broadband the world is moving online whether we like it or not education is online distance learning is online jobs are online job applications everyone benefits from it i didn't create it but it's out of the bag and countries europe is way way ahead of us st paul is not going to be competitive if it doesn't do something about  it these other approaches are really band aids and it's the fact wolf we want to talk about money here's three projects that cost one hundred fifty million the saints ballpark the penfield and the palace theater that's just three a bitch if we really scrutinize i could find projects in the last couple  years that cost five hundred million so the idea that it's about money it's not about money it's about priorities you're not talking about spending the money overnight and five hundred million is a figure russ is just throwing out there construction costs are very high because the money's being spent on question and this is about equity and and gaps we hear a lot about gaps achievement gap on all manner ship gap and income gaps between white house old and households of color what specific things can the city do to shrink these gaps i already talked about the what we need to do and are doing in terms of creating lives of opportunity to city jobs and the internship program i think that's an important component i think probably the next biggest piece would be continuing to strengthen our relationship with the school district and our institutions of higher learning including community colleges like st paul college  i give the mayor a lot of credit and having created this program called sprockets that has unified all of the out of school and afterschool programs across st paul where you can find all those programs in one spot online and coordinated information between the school district the county and the city in terms of which kids are actually needing those services and how they can and how they can get them i think the biggest challenge that we have honestly that we that is unmet in terms of reducing disparities is in early childhood and we have been part of programs where we've gotten federal and state grants to do some to do scholarships for quality early childhood education and preschool in neighborhoods like frogtown and some university but those are wrote those have been relatively short term grant based programs they are extremely expensive programs child care is expensive and so ultimately i think the solutions to that part of the issue are federal and state funding that will go from universal pre k to actually beginning to fund universal child care at earlier and earlier ages i think that's the thing that we can actually do as a society to make the most difference that's not something st paul can do but we can certainly use our voices to make the case that we need to be investing more in our youngest kids  so i think there's a a major gap with the city acknowledging that this is a problem we talk about it and we talk about it and we talk about it and the solution is the federal or state or beyond our means when we can actually get at solving  problem the mayors every iteration of the mayors strategic plan the word poverty is not mentioned once i get russ's e mails for he sends out a list periodically of a newsletter from his office i think i'm all almost never seen the word poverty mentioned there russ is talking about equity now he's been talking about equity recently in mailings having going out but from the start he came in talking about transportation and and sustainability poverty was never part of that message until we acknowledge that we have a problem until we have knowledge it is completely unacceptable to have sixty seven thousand people living below the poverty line and twenty five thousand children all this talk about we should do yes we should do all those things we should have universal child care and early learning and sprockets and all these programs but until you actually start focusing on when you have solving poverty and closing education as a citywide commitment then you're going to solve it when your focus is clearly on development in stadiums and and everything that the chamber talks about week every everything that's in the news is about another project downtown it just keeps about building buildings that is our focus as a city just keep building things not actually invest in people and that's why i have a campaign that talks about people before politics and his neighborhood focus because a city we're not doing that and it's just it becomes talk it's good it's good sounding talk it sounds great for soundbites but actually caring and and knowing the people in poverty and working on programs that will help them that's not happening enough and we need to stop talking about it and actually start acting on it and hopefully i have another saying or i can talk more about what that acting would look like one minute we are acting and i just wanted to mention a couple of the areas in which we are that i didn't before one is that i actually co chaired a group called the big picture project that created a really bold goal for affordable housing along the green line many folks have been assuming that the green line will over time increase the value of land and rents along that corridor and so we created a goal of establishing a lot of affordable housing now before those rents went up so that we would sort of lock in some affordability in our community along that corridor where we hope to also be growing many jobs and have started to do that also in terms of specifically focusing on poverty it's i can tell you i'm my desk at the office and tom hasn't been there and seen it but in my desk there's this like a glass covering and the single piece of paper i have under the glass on my desk is a wilder report one page report on the status of poverty in st paul i think about it every day  goldstein you go first on this one what are the plans for development on energy park avenue where the mid midway stadium lies what would you like to happen what can the city do to help you you not focus on building a stadium there what i think what i think because this site has been neglected for twenty years is why we are faced with something that looks like blighted property it should if if we had put the same energy then we put into a lot of other glitzy your projects into that i think we'd be well on our way to a solution there is a plan the city has a plan to redevelop they don't they don't own the parcel but there was a significant plan that was put put together  that was a group from denver came out and brought it forward it's more you can't do it in one year obviously but over fifteen twenty year period would be a mixed use development with housing and business and things like that first of all i think we need to think bolder i think we need to think a a using technology and that's where broadband comes we could have a tech center there we could attract the kind of jobs that pay twenty five thirty fifty dollars an hour real significant jobs where people are working  economy tech jobs related to med tech software development all the kinds of jobs of the future in the twenty first century where we have far too limited thinking we just think about housing in retail housing in retail i mean that's fine except most retail is national retail and it's not home grown which means it's not living wage jobs the overall impact on the community is not significant enough so i'd like a tech hub as a as a possibility there so that we could attract tech companies create significant jobs the other thing is to look at the shops in st louis park and at that type of entertainment complex or the or for me more properly which i would love to see given the diversity that midway is a midtown global marketplace in minneapolis looking to do something like that in st paul unfortunately all we're hearing is about a stadium and a stadium taskforce and how do we make it work with tax giveaways and that to me is a you know perfect analogy of where the city has misplaced priorities i think tom might have misheard the question i think the question was around what we're going to do with the land of energy park drive or the old midway stadium was and the so you're going to chance to address it in the rebuttal but obviously he wants to talk about stadiums and i'm happy to talk about those too but the landowner part drive was actually given by the city over to the port authority the port authority is jointly developing it with a private developer this is a new model they created about ten years ago they've been kind of public private partnership the intention is to put about two hundred thousand square feet of light manufacturing light industrial space typical kind of port authority type project going back to the jobs issue  and i agree with tom too to a point that we don't have a clear enough job school in st paul but the piece of the puzzle that has been very successful is the port authority turning blighted brownfields into into job centers the part of that that is is that we're running out of those large old industrial sites and we're going to have to start thinking about creating jobs in smaller sites around town addressing briefly because tom brought up the the stadium site the  part of the soccer stadium concept that appeals to me is the opportunity to actually bring in a lot of jobs around it not the stadium itself although that will be some jobs but the opportunity to turn not just the bus barn site but that old shopping center into a much more job dense and high quality job dense location and i would not even support the concept if i didn't believe that that was possible i think tom's got a little bit outdated ideas about how you would do something like create a tech hub the actual way that tech hubs get created is that you create the kinds of places where young tech employees want to be and want to work and the and the employers end up locating in those places because their employees want to be there you don't just sort of build something and they will come it doesn't work that way that's an interesting segue because i think russ may have the outdated view i don't know anybody that's moving to st paul for the view they're moving there for a job so it's not build it you will come put a job there and they will come jobs or would attract people talk young people and ask them where they want to live they don't want to live someplace where there aren't jobs no matter how many breweries and cool things there are if they can't afford to live there they're not going to live there i'm sorry that i misunderstood the question i will point out that we have a three million dollar cleanup that the city's paying for the old midway stadium site something that the port authority conveniently didn't disclose to the city council until the stadium deal was basically done one of the partners in this deal is the pole at companies through united properties which also happens to be part of the ownership group of the soccer stadium that's being proposed for the midway and because i live in the midway i'm sensitive that issue i realize it's stadiums is something i've worked on but it's because i live in the midway so what happens at the mid way at the old midway stadium site may be interesting but the port authorities failure to disclose that to me is is a problem just a quickie for either one of you are there anthony at least i'm aware of just recently act in fact under construction right now in the twenty seven hundred university project which is being built at university and emerald which will be a two hundred forty unit apartment building with some commercial space on the on the corner and the reason why we agreed to use to fund that project was because i personally insisted that if they were going to build housing on that corner that include some affordable units so twenty percent of the units will be affordable to folks earning fifty percent or less of the area median income and that's exactly what the tiff is targeted toward creating the affordability component of that project  because i really value the idea that instead of just allowing market rate development to flourish long university avenue which we would like to see that we make sure that we're actually building that mixed income mixed use community  would be the only one are there are a couple others that just occurred to me you can read from the list to emerald gardens and you know it very place the housing right nearby there were also part of a tiff district those deals predated my time on the council of a fellow bicyclist how concerned are you about the number of potholes and cracks in st paul's streets there's another one here some somewhere about sidewalks to ok i am quite concerned about the condition of our streets and actually i biked up here tonight as i was thinking about coming here and riding up snarling avenue across the bridge because frankly this nor the way to get here from the midway i was thinking how critical it is that we make conditions safer out there for people who are breaking around our community and walking you all may recall that two winters ago we had the vortex and our streets that spring were probably as bad as we've ever seen them we got that message loud and clear i know i did and the council insisted on a major infusion into arterial streets the  pothole issue is a is a tricky one in that we were spending so much money filling potholes that winter that we were actually losing money because regular maintenance of the streets over time would actually be more affordable a big part of that problem honestly and i'm not passing the buck but a big part of the problem a lot of arterial streets are county roads and for many years the county focused on the arterial streets in the rest of the county and not in st paul even though we're more than half of the  county and so we've been having a lot of conversations with our friends at the county about making sure those resources are being spent more equally and that we're getting our fair share in st paul we have made a lot of progress on the arterials the terrible twenty that the mayor's talked about  as a cyclist as a motorist as a pedestrian i think we all care about the condition of the streets up there it's one of those really fundamental things about our city when the mayor came to the council last year and said what are your funding priorities in terms of anything we could do in terms of capital investment the city as a council we stood together and said we have to invest in the streets we also have to do in a way that benefits people who are walking and biking and that's where the eighty vitality initiative came from so when i'm out door knocking and we've knocked on about fifty five hundred doors since i started campaigning in the beginning of july what i say to people is that i don't think it should take a huge public outcry to fix the  streets that we should be able to do that proactively on a regular basis yeah there was a polar vortex and we had a lot of serious you know exacerbated conditions because of that but the biggest issue is because the streets were already in horrible shape before that came along and i can tell you that you know my dealings with the city when i called about a street that was particularly problematic and called public works i basically had a guy who told me that it wasn't on their agenda to fix and that basically i could you know do whatever i wanted he didn't really care and then ultimately he referred me to the city council office this happen to be a stretch of hammon which russ says is a county road stretch of him by target that was literally like a war zone i mean it was so incredibly bumpy that if you're really trying to serve people you would have said we need to solve that problem right now what i heard was well that's not in word for that's in word one so it's the word one council members problem and then got nowhere and then eventually the the amount of shrieking got so loud that they came out in about a day they fix it they scraped off all the tar they've been putting down for years and years instead of rebuilding the road and put a nice smooth service and now we don't have a problem there for the moment but it's interesting the council did finally once for once speak out against the mayor and they appropriated forty two million dollars in funding to deal with some of the biking and other and that they let the mayor take an eight million dollars haircut from that money and put it into renovating the palace theater so even when it comes to roads we're making trades with the mayor instead of insisting that money is all going to go towards our roads so i think there's just a lot of unfortunately there's a lot of excuses there's a lot of shifting there's never a we have a problem that we're not dealing with and here's how we're going to address it and that to me is what's missing right now in the council and in the mayor's office i think in the course of his two minutes tom both congratulated me for taking a stand on roads and then said i'm making excuses and not doing the things i'm not quite following one of the one of the important things to understand is that many years ago when the city started rebuilding residential streets and you probably have seen some of those in your neighborhoods over time where we come in and literally dig up everything right down to the the underlying sewers and infrastructure that program sort of became a point of emphasis because again most of those arterials our county roads we were focused on rebuilding our residential and order to actually put some more resources into those arterials in the last couple of years we've had to  slow down our investments in the residential streets there weren't a lot of other options so we actually have an increase in the funding going into streets overall but we've had to do some shifting as well because the priority became those those those arterial streets and it was clear and we all acted on it and to the point you know my time's up ready i think we're going to have this be the last question we've got more and more questions than time and i'll put two of them together on  serving on the council consensus is crucial to get ordinances passed and the council a name and mixed experience where you belt built consensus to get things done and this other one is if a council member proposes a change should that individual be present for voting on the proposed issues anyway serving on the council and see mr goldstein yes not sure which question to answer but as far as consensus i think we build consensus on bread broadband we went around to caucuses we got people to show up support a broadband initiative we brought the initiative to the city council it passed with the most votes  became part of the d f l platform and then the city did nothing with it so you can build consensus but if you don't have the right people there they're willing to take action that's why you can be problematic i think the council has is has remarkable consensus right now it's almost seven zero votes for most of the matters that come before the city but i don't think that we're really doing innovative terribly creative or visionary things i know that that's so hard for people to hear because there are many people like me who really love st paul and you want to believe that your city is doing excellent work and you don't want to hear some of the in camino truths that are there but i for those who got the sheet and those who don't have it i can give it to you when you leave there's just a whole series of things that i won't go into but some of them should catch your attention one is our health department was taken over by the state inspection department i mean taken over the problems are so egregious that the state had to step in and take it over and if you read what or the said from the state you would think that they were pretty significant problems we had a park collapse in the lead deal were two kids died and the city just said you know we're sorry but we didn't know it was a problem there's there's very serious issues we're confronting as a city and so i don't think the question we need to be asking is about building consensus it's about what can we do to make the city more accountable solve problems not have excuses not give us explanations for why we're not doing what we need to do but actually put a vision out there for where we're going to be and how we're going to make this city really live up to this slogan we have the most will see america that's the kind of campaign that i'm trying to run and that's what i'm working for you don't necessarily have to create consensus on the council to to move the matter forward you do have to get to at least four votes sometimes five depending on the issue and and bobby me cards over here saying you've got to four as as council president this year it's been an interesting process of trying to be that person who is trying to figure out as a council what are our collective goals where were points of agreement disagreement and how can we work with the mayor demonstration to further those goals there is a lot of work to figure out how to collaborate we do have a strong mayor system in st paul the council has a strong role as well but to tom's earlier about the mayor and the palace theater project is part of the eighty vitality fund you do have to work with people who have different priorities than you do and still get things done and sometimes that means doing this and this you can't always just sort of pound your fist and say no you're not going to get anywhere you're not going to get anything done even though in st paul we are all followers on the council at this point we have very different perspectives very different priorities in terms of where we think resources should be going and there's not a lot of resources for the most part that are in question most of our resources in the city are going to the day to day stuff police department fire department that everyone values and that doesn't change very much from year to year so we're really talking about working around the edges when you have rare opportunities to make investments because some debt got paid off or some federal money was available for the most part in my time on the council one of the biggest issues has been the recession and coming out of the recession our departments got leaner and leaner and leaner to the point where frankly in the case of d s i they were taken over by the state and  tom talks a lot about the fact that we talk about not having any money and build stadiums the really huge disconnect between what's actually in the paper most of the time and most of the real work going on in city  ask is there a reason why we're ending early because the library is going to calls so they close the date they do but we have to be out of here before that and pack up and ok i'm not sure how to answer it other than to say that getting to consensus what are we getting to consensus about if you look at st paul name a company a significant company or business that has come to st paul that h significant number of jobs in the last five years what we're doing is building buildings this is developers paradise we are enriching developers we are reaching like bernie sanders says millionaires and billionaires people want to project they come to the city we have to funding that contra to what russ is saying we're giving away pretty liberally the money that the the issue with the health department others is an issue of management if you have a money problem that doesn't keep you from mismanaging you use you talk you talk about what you need and make sure people are aware there's a whole sheet here that shows this is not about money it's about mismanagement and until we acknowledge that we have problems we're not going to solve the problems and if we don't do that we're not going to move forward i'm sorry that's the inconvenient truth that we need to deal with  i'm going to read some of the topics that we don't have time for tonight just so that you and the audience well know that your concerns are expressed and the candidates can hear what they  are there is one on the block captains conversion of single family homes to rental property protecting against mass shootings in the schools like in  cost of street maintenance partnering with the university school start times trash hauling  equity african american and high poverty level and on and on employment and immigrants there's a lot a lot of issues out there and our future city councilman will have to deal with all of them mr starke you were the first person to begin the opening statement so the closing statements will be a mystical st thanks for coming i'm going to steal a line from robert redford from the movie the candidate and say i want to talk about the things that we didn't talk about tonight i want to talk about how we're going to attract cutting edge businesses st paul i want to talk about how we're go leverage our city resources to maximize educational outcomes for children i want to talk about how we're going to have tax policies that do not unduly burden homeowners or small business i want to talk about how we're going to make broadband a reality in this city that everyone can benefit from and how we're going to do simple things like adopt a strategy that when you have the streets open that you put condor in the ground which cause pennies compared to the tens of thousands you'll spend if you have to put it in later after the grounds already closed up i want to talk about how we're go reform or zoning code so that neighborhoods are radically protected against census teardowns in the growing phenomenon of mcmansion something that the city is not adequately addressing i want to talk about how we're going to reform tiff and have complete transparency so can we can all see the kind of money we're putting into to if in the kind of expenditures we have in the city that aren't going to benefit residents i want to talk about how we're going to look at environmental measures such as banning plastic shopping bags doing away with styrofoam preventing runoff into our lakes i want to talk about auditing our city departments and using the power of the city council to conduct investigations so that we have another voice in the city besides just the mayor's agenda which mr stark is clearly hitches wagon to because the mayor just did a fundraiser for him a couple of weeks ago and i want to talk about urban tree canopy and about trimming our trees on a regular basis because that's an environmental thing that is very important to us sustaining our neighborhoods and i want to talk about a city wide scorecard that measures how we're doing on several key indicators so that we know how we're doing and lastly i want to talk about plowing we should have allie piling in st paul it's it's sort of the poster child of things of we can't do is a city even though we have all these other excuses that we can do thank you thanks again for coming out tonight it's great to have this opportunity congratulate tom on good debate tonight the second one we've had and they've been really i think substantive conversations a couple of things similar to tom i want to focus on the things that i want to focus on the third term we have to continue to invest in infrastructure in the city that's going to allow people to move around our community more safely we have to continue to invest in transit in other parts of the city beyond the green line we've got to make our city safer for biking and walking one of our huge competitive advantages is that we are been and people want to be here and they want to be able to walk and bike around our community safely we've got a lot of work to do we have to improve our solid waste systems i believe we should move to organize trash collection in the city of st paul where one of the biggest cities in the country that doesn't have it it's ridiculous we spend far too much money on our trash collection our alleys are paying the price our streets are paying the price our air is paying the price we have to focus more attention than we have been on the issue of equity and racial disparities and those are the three big east for me tom has brought a lot of good ideas to the table with that list  the one of the pieces of advice that i got coming into office eight years ago and if tom wins this election it will be my advice to him as well and that is the city is a big organization it's a big ship you're not going to be able to change as much of it as you want to  think about changing three percent and shoot choose that three percent carefully i've done that by focusing on sustainability transportation and transit issues my intention is to shift a little bit of that focus more toward the equity and racial disparity issues in a third term because i think that is now the biggest challenge facing our city i look forward to having the opportunity to do that or to having tom being our new council member and giving him some good advice about how we can all do that together thank you very much candidates and audience for coming out i think that the candidates will stay around for a little chat before the library closes us down if any of you wouldn't mind i think it would help the library if we stick the chairs thank you very much and good night