welcome to girl talk i'm an air i'm carol voice on and girl talk is a lot of me discussion of the opportunities challenges and successes of women in their daily lives we interview women  living here in the rock valley who are making a difference in their communities today we are talking with two women who have recently been elected to our local city councils our nd guest is emily  elected to the talent thirty council two years ago but i'm sure that she still has some challenges that she didn't expect so carol would you like introduce our guest emily i'd love to introduce you but i don't roll that much but would you please introduce yourself khost tell us like how did you get here to talent or to talent and why you got involved in politics because it is so such a funny about a year and a half touring the country and a van with my husband band i decided to go back to school and we settled down in ashland and i started going to s o u and while as a student there i got introduced to road climate and cool i'm a member of road climates board of directors started getting really involved in local issues particularly the jordan cove l n g pipeline issue excellent and working on climate conversations in talent so after some time in ashland ended up moving to talent because it was more affordable to live busy than ashland was and one of the very st things that we did as road climate in talent was start hosting community living room conversation around the noticeable impacts of climate change and through those conversations started to develop the clean energy action plan that the city has now adopted and after we wrote that plan and before it was adopted to the city council i was kind of in limbo and thought what am to do next i'm done writing this plan and i'm still in school working time and i needed something else to fill my already full plate and a seat opened up on  the talents of the council for appointment that was in the middle of a term and i applied i wasn't selected for that appointment but that was in july or august works for geo institute in wealth and climate and so do you do you to bump into each other along the way recently it's been mostly at jordan cove event of lee ran into each other  department of state lands hearing earlier this year and the senate house the house committee on carbon reduction for the clean energy jobs bill hearing a few months ago so we keep running into each other in those the news but not so much professionally are you still in school no i graduated in two thousand and seventeen with a bachelor's in environmental studies ok very good you're doing your walking the walk yes that's great all day every day great yeah i just returned from alaska cruise very small boat and there were two biologists on it and i ask each one of them separately they weren't they didn't overhe the other and i said what do you think about climate change people said the same thing they said the human race is doomed there's no way we're going to get out of this what do you think that's a big question right out of the gate yeah you know so much about the conversation around climate change for so long has been about save the planet save the animals and i think that there is a lot of truth in that but at the end of the day or i guess at the end of our lifetime it's really us the humanity that we have control over busy and that is causing climate change and is busy going to suffer the most from the impacts the earth will go on were right time it changes not going to explode the earth and will destroy the particles floating in outer space but it's going to become uninhabitable for humanity the  comfort that we have come to know and love over the last five thousand to ten thousand years is going to go away and so we and the planet has never held seven billion plus people on it before so we've done a lot of things that this planet that's been around for millions of years has never seen before and as much as a changing climate is natural to earth's changing systems it's never changed with people on it so that's really what it comes down to is it's our existence that is threatened and it's our ability to exist with plants and animals that we utilize that hat that we harvest and consume or that we benefit from and ones that we just enjoyed for their beauty and ground floor and fauna but yeah i would say that our existence is threatened for sure so if it's that kind of crisis what do you think we should be doing so much like it's su not doing we should be holding the corporations accountable busy that are has put us into this mess you know i much of the work that i do is about individual impact and what can we do as individuals to make a difference reduce our impact or give a beneficial impact and why i put emphasis on that is because it is such a big issue and it can feel so depressing and depleting to think about it for five minutes for five hours for five years and we can empower ourselves by taking individual action by turning off our lights when we're not in the room by using a ceramic cup over a plastic cup you for that reason yeah well you mentioned empowerment so what i feel is you know i can't do much at the national level can do a little bit at the state level but where i feel empowered is at the level so that's where you know the policies that are implemented by our small communities so i want to get back to the you being on the city council challenge to the council and before we start up i want to run a video of you i took a little clip of you i've been to many ashland city council meetings but this was my st talent city council meeting and it's a little different a little more informal so can we run that video of the talent city council gender is weighted in the female direction we do have equity now and in ashland with thirty three female counsellors but anyway i wanted to ask you know you've been on the council for two years so i'm sure you don't have a lot of surprises anymore but if you can think back when you st started it was something that you did not anticipate as as a counsellor and talent i think the biggest thing that caught me by surprise being on the council was the length of meetings i had then to a few council meetings i had presented at a few council meetings on behalf  of climate and the work that we were doing in talent but i had yet to stay through the whole length of the meeting and in my interview for the appointment seat i said well i'm a student i sit all day i can sit through lectures and meetings for hours and hours but it's a very different reality when you sit down as at six o'clock for a meeting and you're there till ten o'clock and you have to be attentive to you have to be attentive you have to be  attentive to the individuals next to you and the audience and the staff and navigating all of the present personalities all of the background and research that you're bringing into it being sensitive to the work that staff has put in that's that has definitely been i think one of the biggest struggles has been the city staff who spend forty plus hours a week working on research and background and materials and reason for issues to come before council and then council gets a packet of information six days before the meeting and talent council is all working class all working folks there's one person on the council who's retired oh so different in our county offices so everybody is working  has families and lives and other extracurricular activities and often we come into the meeting and and we maybe haven't had forty hours to spend reviewing the information and or dinner or dinner exactly as the meeting of the clip that you just showed i had been driving for a good hour i think arrived literally when i for the meeting and and see you know there's a lot  happens outside of the meeting or isn't happening outside of the meeting that you have to be conscientious of in that time and when a counselor is asking a question or raising a point of concern making sure that we're being sensitive and cognizant of the amount of time that staff has put in and recognizing that we're just learning this and so there's some kind of emotional  tiptoeing that has to happen to make sure that you're not diminishing the work that staff has done but again all again the limited amount of time that we've had with the information right and the public the public is there talking a public input as we have a national in where the public again and talking on anything they want to talk you know we have a citizens heard on non agenda item section where anybody can come and speak to any point and set up was this to improve communications with residents and increase transparency so how are you doing that that's a really great question and it's something that we've had on the top of our goals the whole time that i've been on council good and a lot of our goals come from past experience so maybe we found a couple years ago that nobody knew what was going on nobody could access any information and so we make it a goal to improve on that and so we have over the last year or so we have been working on finding a way to improve our website because i'm glad you could find something on it that's really really hard to find it isn't easy it's not very deep no going to tell you and don't try to use the search function oh no it won't help you same in ash literary i will say the actual website is a little easier to navigate it's a little more user friendly but it's bad and redoing the talent website is one of our top priorities but it's very costly and so that's another thing we're really often needing to balances  cost gives us the highest benefit and meets the biggest need of our community so improving transparency and proving communication we're doing better at promoting events and meetings on face book and making sure that the counselors who are involved in facebook on their personal pages are speaking to their counsel positions appropriately not over  speaking you know just referring people to the appropriate information on the website rather than saying just find it on the website we're actually doing the work to find the in a regular on the website and share that with individual if you're lootings televised and they're not televised so somebody has to come to the meeting if they want to see or hear what's happened yeah yeah we did just redo all of our audio equipment so our audience can hear us better when they're in the room but we don't have any video capacity yet our meetings are recorded so somebody can listen to the audio after the meeting so that's good but really to be in the moment either got to be there or sometimes if it's a really hot topic somebody will come and do a live stream look on their own phone so people can access it that way but it's really infrequent so you have had some public open houses and i know one of them had to do with the smart meters and so were you part of that i was a part of making sure that that got scheduled but i did not attend it at the time i was working  as the company that i work for we partner with electric utilities to manage green power programs and at the time i was working as a representative for pacific power oh i had to refuse you i didn't attend  meeting just to keep things a little that there is a good idea but i i was one of the main counselors encourage that meeting to happen and really spearheaded the adoption any was there anybody else knew on the council of the time were you the only new councillor i think that i was the only newly elected somebody else i believe was elected but they were who had been appointed a few months prior so they'd been sitting on the council for a few months already what did you get any training did anybody step up and kind of mentor you do the giving public meeting lot you know public meeting training any of that there were some open meetings and trainings that were offered up to other agencies were making available but at the lot and on my father was a city councillor in grants pass when i was younger so i leaned on him a lot and then a few months in when stephanie dolan was appointed to the council we somehow ended up walking our dogs at the same time almost every day so we would rendezvous and mentor you not either and that's kind of i we started our relationship but to counselors together is not a meeting so so there's that restriction you can have three counselors yeah i gather you know so another goal that you have in talent is that you make to two increased land availability and that you improve housing affordability so how are you doing the latter improving housing affordability that's a great question and i would say that that's not my specific area of expertise but what i can speak to on that is we're doing a lot of state level advocacy another one of our goals busy this year was to engage in state legislation more and be writing more resolutions to send to our state representatives for things that would benefit talent so any time that there has been a a bill in the house or the sun and that could have some repercussion on housing housing availability housing pricing construction excise taxes climate change even we're writing a resolution within talent to speak to that or sending letters and calling our representatives because so much of what talent could do is dependent on what the state allows us to do so we've been doing a lot of state level advocacy so you familiar with house bill two thousand and one they're going to be changing the zoning are one to allow for cottage housing duplexes says so you're in support of that at the state level water yeah is an issue and they say it's going to be you know one of the major issues we specially in the valley face so what is talent to win with the water situation because you used  tap and so would you explain what you're planning to do with a robot is the future of talent water supply yahoo or doing we've been going through a whole water masterplan process right now i think it's almost done if not just recently finished but we're building a new water reservoir our current read of why are are really really outdated they're not ok so we're building a new one of those to to store water for us but we get our water supplies through the medford water commission right and they pump it into talent and then talent has a pumping station on our public works property and then we pump it on tash land and to our residents then because the station is downhill from where all of our residents are it's one of our largest energy consumers is water moving so they're they're hand in hand issues there of how much water are we using and moving and how much energy is that consuming also and that's huge it's huge it lot of attention into evaluating good or solar potential has been our water pumps and it kind of not totally sure if it will be good there or not just based on where the property is  it's in floodplain and things like that but long term you know reducing water consumption where we're looking at redoing all of our distribution lines w town it be like attend to fifteen year project and millions and millions of dollars but all of our water pipes are old and cracking and decaying and so there's a lot of water loss taxes nobody wants to pay more busy for solar rays rays or raise rates but everybody wants more reliable service more efficient service they want to and have that peace of mind that we're not going to end up like flint michigan  and contaminated water in five hundred and ten years and so how do we how do we balance the needs and the opposition to paying for it how are you dealing with it that's a know that in ten years our water system theoretically in ten years our water system is going to fail if we don't do anything about it so we need to be preparing for that now so then in ten years we're not hit with this bill busy that we could have insulated ourselves against when we knew about it ten years prior kind of climate change so let's start saving and let's rather than in ten years do a twenty percent increase on water bills let's let's be doing incremental raises and so yes everybody will see an increase every year and that sucks but we'll be building up our financial reserves so that we can pay for that without needing towards bonds and i think than there are something that we're really really active and effective decades ago but have been the bonds that we are paying into now were adopted years ago and there haven't been a whole lot of new bonds  so people aren't familiar with the concept and are really adamantly opposed julie well that's that's all the time we have ladies and i'd like to thank you very much for c cameron lighting and alexis on another camera and iran will be who helped with sound thank you very much all of you would you be able to have this program without these full time volunteers thursdays or demand online it r p t be done s o u dot edu you can click on the public access at the top of the page and then search for girl talk girl talk and also be heard i also have another road valley t v program called getaway girl and it is a travel show about my travels around the world that takes you outside of yourself and into other places that can open you up to new people new experiences and new inspiration my most recent show was my trip to alaska carol mentioned that she was in alaska also the beautiful state and went kayaking and hiking at the catch not be so you might want to check that out we hope you learned something new today and will join us again soon by