forum the cans were producing all deserve the opportunity to share their thoughts so we actually refrain from applauding whistling or making any noise in response to their answers if you want to boo hoo or his it me you can do that but not these four yeah it's pretty good  it's got a little like moment to start the debate and like that ok at the end we will encourage you all to applaud them for being here the scene is very challenging and i'm sure they get some great answers for silly fun and exciting part of the debate will focus on questions from the audience as well so just hold your hand up and they will they will get you a card write your question down i don't know that we'll get to all the questions we will select from those questions a couple for the candidates and we'll go forward from there  a question raise your hand make sure that i think we've got most of you give you a second here for these folks to get through this process it's a lot of questions it's a great choice voting eric please will work on the side in this election year so i just like if you voted for city council in two thousand and eleven or mayor and twenty thirteen here you get to rank the candidates as if you like them first all the way through six and there's not six candidates running here in order to win the way the counting or work is coming up all those first choices and if someone gets over fifty percent of the first choices they win the counting is over and that's it but if no one quite gets to fifty percent of those first choices then there will be more counting left to do  the monday after the election up finally for sure who's who's won and i hope you can use this opportunity at the forum here to think not just about who your first choice is going to be but also your second third maybe and fourth will be something you so much sponsors from the candidates themselves the candidates each came up with questions to ask each other and that will be a lot of fun and then the final round will be your questions and so i hope you've got some because otherwise we're going to have to ask these folks what their you know secret service code name would be yours or something like that pam for the rule be to keep things moving along we're not going to have strict time limits in this debate but i would ask that you guys keep your your time you know to a minute  three at the most per answer if you ramble on too long i do reserve the right to respectfully ask you to wrap things up and then let someone else have a chance to talk but i'm sure that won't be necessary during this debate so that's all i have to say at the beginning rather than me introducing the candidates and i would begin by just having each introduce yourself to about two minutes apiece and we will start with mr bill hospital music forest cafe many of you don't know this back when i decided to open our gallery here in my home town i could have done so in minneapolis but you know my heart was here i was living up in northwest minnesota on a farm and i was doing a lot of my own artwork selling of the other art galleries but i decided to open up my own gallery here and it had to be in doubt unstable it was going to be minneapolis it wasn't going to be in a strip mall somewhere but it had to be in downtown st paul and after all these years there's not a single regret that i've done this on the table out there earlier and i'll have you with me tonight another little fact you might not know about is since the fall of one thousand nine hundred eighty eight when i was eighteen years old i started collecting articles on the development of downtown st paul in the river front anything ever built thought of or wanted that was mentioned in print since that time i haven't these books so if you want to take a look at one of those on the way i would be happy to show i just turned fifty three and you know i feel like i'm fourteen inside i love life every day every year i get older i like it more and the truth is heard if i think why i like life so much as i've met all of these really nice people in the last twenty one years and some of you i've known for many years and i'm very happy to be here when everything is made of you know i've run for office in the past i came in second place the last two go arounds incumbent dave doing is retiring so perhaps with your help i will get in there this november th thank you all so much for coming out tonight i was actually i have a two year old and a one year old and i was dipping them into their coats this morning for the track outside and it occurred to me that this is the time of year when you know it's kind of time to huddle inside your home and not necessarily venture out into the public sphere for things like this so the fact that you all took the time to come out really means a lot my name is rebecca nacre and i am hoping to earn your first choice support to represent you and board to on the st paul city council and i don't know about you but i feel like this is an incredibly this is a time when we have new businesses opening on every corner we have our population is growing for the first time in so many years there are new restaurants see it just field is booming we have so much to be excited about and at the same time we know that we have substantial challenge thirty percent of the children in our city live in poverty we have some of the biggest gaps in our country in our in our city in the country between white people and people of color in terms of achievement and in terms of employment we have homeless people on our streets every day and every night without adequate services we have pensions as we grow in our city between residents and between business owners between biking and parking between people who live downtown and people who come to visit downtown and these are all serious challenges that we're going to have to deal with over the next few years i'm running for this office because i come from a family and from a faith tradition that have taught me that when you see things around you that need to be improved it's your responsibility to do what you can to make them right and that's what i've been doing ever since i was eleven years old and i started a club for the kids in my neighborhood called the good deeds club and we just kind of met and did our projects and marched around with posters every every weekend  became a public school teacher in baton rouge louisiana ranked forty ninth in education in the country at the time as a state to when i went to india to work for public education there and now i work at a huge minneapolis supporting public schools in minneapolis so this is what i've been doing for my entire life but i'm also running for this office not just to make policy change but to make a cultural change because i've been talking to people in our city for the last two years and what i hear over and over again and we've seen evidence of it just in the last couple  weeks is that people feel left out of the process again and again people feel like we need more transparency in how decisions are made people need to be included whether they live on the west side or summit hill or west seventh or downtown and people feel like we need  courage to make decisions that are sometimes unpopular there sometimes not what the mayor would want but they're the right thing for our neighborhood or for our city and those values of transparency and inclusively and courage are things that i have been living and working my entire life my entire career and their values that i look forward to bringing to the city council so thank you and i look forward to a great discussion out tonight and thank you to the capitol river council and provoke for putting this together what a nice theater my name is derek told that i'm really excited about the opportunity to be your city council member next year i grew up in s paul i was the first of my family to go to college i served in the national guard to pay my way through the university of minnesota and in one thousand nine hundred six i moved here to st paul to be an organizer on the wells doe reelection campaign that year that experience taught me the value and the importance of progressive organizing and i've been here in st paul for the last twenty years doing just that last year i was invited to a meeting at the bigger rec center on the west side to talk about kids getting into trouble in the out of school times and we had this meeting in the parking lot of the bigger rec center because it was locked and the irony was not lost on me that weare trying to figure out how to keep kids out of trouble outside locker rec center so i decided at that point that i needed to put my experience to work for the people is a ball and run for city council so i've been doing that for the last year or been going around talking to people about three things about making sure that the city is providing quality public services that are rec centers and our libraries are open and providing opportunities for seniors for kids for families and that we're building strong and safe neighborhoods that we have complete streets that are safe for all users that we have healthy businesses along economic orders and that we are engaging all citizens in this process and that we're making sure that we're talking to people and listening to people and moving forward together so that is why i would like your support for the to be your first choice in this november's election thank you very much  all three candidates and we're now going to move on to the first part of our being these are general questions about downtown st paul that come from the debate organizers which is the building owners and managers association in the capital river council the first get to answer each of these questions this first one we're going to start with rebecca nager and the question is as a newly elected member of the same post city council what is your highest priority for driving growth in downtown and increasing the overall thank you so those of us who live in downtown or who visit downtown know that there's rice park which is very lively there's mears park and lowertown which are booming and exciting and vibrant and then there's that area in between right the ghost town the dead zone the pros and zone is what i've heard it called actually speaking to david miller when he was still the general manager at the st paul hotel he told me that he advises his guests to drive from the hotel to meir's park because there's just nothing to see on the way there's no point in walking to me if the herd of your downtown is called the dead zone of the ghost town in the frozen zone that's that doesn't reflect very well on you as a city and so my highest priority would be t enliven that that zone in between rice and mirrors so that we have a continuously exciting and alive downtown so there are a couple ways i would do this first of all i think there is nothing like street level retail to make it feel like things are happening and that doesn't just provide opportunities for commercial endeavor for getting more revenue for the city for expanding our tax base but it also makes people feel safer as they're walking along in their eyes on the street which right now you walk along the corridors and kind of blank buildings and sometimes you feel a little bit unsafe so i would make it easier for businesses to open and expand i have a couple of ideas about how to do that one of which is just a concierge system in city hall so instead of a business owner having to go through ten or twelve different departments to get the permits that they need to open they go to one person in city hall who helps them bring those departments together and sort of fast track the applications of businesses that we want to see in our city i also want to make sure that along that corridor between rice and mirrors we have opportunities for people who are of all ages we talk about eighty vitality a lot right now in downtown if you have small children and i talk to lots of people who do there's not a lot for them to do after school there are a lot of parks for them to hang out and there are a lot of there are a lot of rec centers downtown and and if you're eighty years old there isn't a lot for you to do either so i want to make sure that the kinds of things that we're putting in cater to people at all all age ranges i'm really in support of the fourth street greenway i think this is an exciting idea to take cars off of fourth street already limited to one lane anyway and to make that a bike way to get people walking from one side of downtown to the other i think that's going to help encourage that retail there as well and then finally i'm i'm really excited about coming up with a way to do a downtown ambassador core in st paul i don't like taking ideas from our western suburb across the river but i do think that if you walk around downtown minneapolis and you see the downtown improvement district or wearing those vests sweeping up trash helping guide people from place to place doing way finding having walkie talkies with them so it feels like there's more of an authoritative presence around if you needed help and really be excited about bring the my highest priority is to engage downtown as neighborhood there's thousands of people living downtown thousands of new people living downtown and we need to make sure we need to realize that and embrace that as that this is a place that people live work and play so we need to build connections both physical and personal the pedestrian connections the skyways the sidewalks transit bike and way finding we need to make sure that we're building those build your building between there's park rights par as well as pedro park and then all the way around st paul is well there's a lot of downtown there's multiple neighborhoods and within downtown and we need to get in between we need to encourage more investment and as a city council member i would encourage more investment from our building owners in those in what was referred to as the dead zone to create warm in public spaces  for community and commerce we can't ignore public safety we have to look at that as well and i think that more investment will will bring that we need to encourage small business development the diverse retail entertainment dining options that people who downtown to find we need to do that not just for residents but for the workers and the general overall vitality of downtown don't forget access to the river we are one of the great things that said st paul apart from other cities is the beautiful mississippi river and st paul is on and we need to embrace that and the great river master planning process that's gone on i'm sure many of you were a part of it i was too we need to keep that in mind as we design forward  we need to move ahead with things that i have been working on like like i said earlier age old heart we were successful this year in getting the police finally out of that building and in the future few years we need to  building down and really have a nice beautiful green space there too and i'd like to make sure that the district council downtown is representative of the residents it's great that the district council has many interest in downtown but it is the only place where people live downtown have to have a strong voice and i want to make sure that their voice is really represented in that district council thank you mr towboat and finally i'll just repeat the question  so people know what you're responding to what is your highest priority for driving growth in downtown and increasing the overall vitality of the area well like my counterparts there's not just one thing there's there's a number of things you know when i opened my art gallery i was probably number two hundred as far as the retail business i was probably in two hundred the place at this point time i'm probably eight and place only supply asked by candyland and walgreen's and a couple of other places so i've survived and seen a lot my number one thing a lot of you perhaps know this is over the years when citizen input has been asked for on a project after project after project in the end people weren't really listened to and that will be the first thing that will change if i get elected the other thing is these are all small but they're important things when you contact my office your call will be taken and or it will be returned you know the the ballpark the new saints ballpark i mean i was really on the city council of the mayor to allow the public to have input on that ultimately the ballpark design and construction committee was created in that the same time a city hall blog was created the ball park committee that some of you  participated could not have it could could have been better obviously the city hall blog unless it's changed it allows you to post one content but not more than one so there's really not a dialogue amongst people that needs to change because then you can help educate each other on what's going on meeting about it resident showed up and you know ultimately things change for is that bus stop being moved annually the mayor gives a state of the city address and we always hear about what we've seen but we often don't hear about what we've lost and we really can't keep track of where we're going unless we talk about the profit and loss on an annual basis that's something that i would encourage the current opportunities that are really out there is the reuse of macy's very it's very it and i think rebecca mentioned earlier what goes in there and used multigenerational and multiuser need to be something in there for everybody place they can go because macy's was kind of an anchor destination and we lost that when they closed union depot it's i think there's report not long ago it's losing six million dollars a year and we need to find a way to actually make that thing generate revenue and be a daily weekly year round attraction concepts for that i'm not going to give your time tonight perhaps maybe later  that's that's a hole that needs to be filled at talk before st greenway i i'm not in favor of this time of removing traffic on fourth street i'm sorry folks the thing was just rebuilt i mean and now we're going to spend millions of dollars making it all up for street could make you made beautiful as this with a lot of green space and if anything ever been to sioux falls south dakota they have a beautiful art walk and with four street largely i c s we could install an art walk that would actually bring people from lower town to seventh down here that the new york darkhorse restaurant all the way up to the west seventy area so there's a lot of possibilities thank you you thank ok this is a question number two from the pre determined questions from the organizers this  total you'll be answering first on this one please discuss your view of transit in transportation and tell us what you think whether you think downtown parking should be expanded or contracted assuming that downtown continues to grow down i think we can assume that downtown is going to continue a healthy transportation system is important for all of us it's important to our public health it's important to the life of our city and and its and it's important to our planet so i've worked for twenty years to build out that system here in st paul for more sidewalk coverage for more skyway access for better transit  access as well as saved by pros those are the goes things i believe in those are things i've worked on for a long time and those are things i'm going to work on as a city council member i want to i want to work hard to expand that system we need to have and we're looking forward to having better transit options in the riverview cord or going down west seven as well as hopefully a street car and robert's tree that will go over to the west side flats these sort of connections are going to build a stronger downtown and for all of us cars are also part of that downtown it's a major transportation choice and adequate parking is absolutely necessary for downtown you know the reason downtown parking study was a crucial first step in in building those relationships and starting that conversation between residents workers and employers building owners and everyone working together to find solutions for parking as we move forward and then those things that we need  sions think it was your trouble to mr haas go same question to you and what's your view of transit and transportation and tell us what you think the downtown parking should be expanded or contracted as the downtown continues to grow well if you want to transit  leader i met i've been riding that bus for twenty one years i'm a year round bicyclists so i walk the walk and ride the ride and pedal the pedal i guess you might say the immediate thing that needs to be addressed has been put off for many years is for anybody who rides the bus on a regular basis there's a lot of poor behavior on the bus you know there's loud behavior profanity at times and frankly kids grow up in this environment a good society does not allow this to continue i member somebody at metro transit told me a number of years ago there's no political will to help them address this and i will help address it transit going down west seventh street there's an option talk about street cars  bus and perhaps light rail i looked at all the other the above objective lee street cars with all due respect they don't really make a lot of economic sense winded cannot eliminated existing bus route most of the buses that run that quarter of the fifty four the seventy fo the sixty three and there's one going up st clair they're largely underutilized as is the the the thing that is kind of exciting i think is the potential of light rail in the future leaving the back side of union depot following a right of way along shepherd road with a stop at the west publishing site on this rebuild some day bottom of chestnut hill which serves the upper landing the river front and all that activity up near the xcel and cosette  all that and then pass the high bridge would cross over and utilize the ford plant railroad spur which stops at the ford plant so there to be a stop at schmitt of the new housing up in the rebuilt simply plaza and then the last stop would be up at the ford plant site and then ultimately crossing the river and hooking up to the blue line that's very exciting many of you don't know that the ford plant was st paul's largest private taxable property and i would argue if there will be in the future at least  a light rail to that stop the value of that property would really escalate a lot as first part in downtown it in the future when residential is added  there will almost always certainly be red parking is part of that underneath the building commercial or commercial sector still is contracting it's really not growing so it seemed like for many years to come there is enough commercial parking parking meters is something i spent on a lot of people's minds i was at the lynwood rec center last night people are really hot under the collar about that parking meters downtown i do not support the extension of parking meters primarily because this market down here is becoming much more residential and commercial so what impact residents allowed and then biking the bike loop downtown there's a way of putting in a bike loop of sorts that makes biking a lot more user friendly down here but that also retains the on street parking that's important thank you mr haas go rebeca nigger what's your view of transit and transportation in should parking be expanded or contracted as downtown ro the green line is a great start but all of us who take transit know that it's not nearly enough if the people who make decisions about transit every day are dependent on transit i think with the things looking a lot different w to thank you see buses coming every ten minutes not every fifty five minutes as i was stranded downtown a couple months ago luckily without my children waiting for one we'd see heated bus shelters and shelters that are actually shelters not just a sign or if you're lucky a bench we probably see why fire on buses and all of these things i think are necessary in order to make transit not an option of last resort it has to be a first choice for people who have choices not the last possible thing you can do if you have no other choice that's really important to me and that is an equity issue in my opinion we also talk about other forms of transportation it has to be safe and easy and accessible for you to get around downtown and all over the city whether you're pushing a stroller in a wheelchair with a cane on a bike or on your two feet that's how you make your city truly accessible through all methods of transportation for everyone who lives here now when it comes to parking i actually don't know if we have enough of it downtown the parking management study said that at peak capacity we're at about seventy three percent of our parking spaces fall unfortunately that study didn't take into account monthly contract parking so they counted as empty spaces spaces and ramps that were empty but they were actually monthly contract spaces which any of you have ever done a round about in a parking ramp know that that's pretty frustrating to find that those are the only ones that are left and when it really comes to parking i was like my husband last night and saying the search for parking is kind of like the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe wait a second i mean ultimately it's not about whether or not it exists as much as it is about whether or not you can find it right and right now i've tried parking tonight it's not easy to find and i think that's ultimately what it's about now does that mean that we need to create more parking i would say no not right now because i don't think creating a vibrant exciting downtown i don't think that exciting downtown and i'm thirty one years old i'm a millennial when i think about moving to an exciting city it's not one that's full of parking ramps frankly i don't know about anybody else the idea is that that's probably not what brought you downtown so i think instead of building additional parking right now we need to do is a few things first i would give it light and another year because we know that when new technology comes along people don't automatically change their old habits and adapt so we might see some changes in terms of people taking transit if we get a light rail another year i also think that if we get parking meters downtown time i frankly disagree with bill on this i think that we've been not valuing our downtown parking enough i think st paul is growing up were a big city we have a lot to offer and we need to value that what it's worth and i think downtown parking in the evening is worth a lot these days especially when people park in our downtown and use it as a park and ride to take light rail and go to a twins game so i'm excited to see what happens as parking meters come online and as we hopefully balance out the cost of on street and off street parking i think better signage is essential drive around downtown even if you live here you don't know where to find a parking ramp and you don't know what the what the charges until you're already halfway through the bar and you don't know if there's any parking left at their and then i would also work with ramp owners to see if some of those extra monthly contract parking spaces can actually be converted into perhaps short term parking so that when you're running into the done brothers and waba shod victory ramp has a five minute spot for you right there that you can pull into and pay a dollar for for example i start laughing that's a very exciting thing and finally if there are still problems i would then do the parking study again and this time take into account monthly contract spaces and then see if we still have any thank you look very moving on now to part two of the debates and purge you is  questions for the candidates from the candidates this gets a little complicated it's kind of like rank choice voting or something like that so each candidate was asked to come up with a question for one of the both of the other two candidates and so we're go so you know you've worked in government for your whole career you've gotten the support of the mayor and council member through you your campaign has been seeking and getting indorsements from lots of elected leaders and ye think that over the next few years we're going to need to make decisions that might maybe be different from what the mare would want where we're going to need independent thinking and so my question for you is is there a specific policy that you could talk about maybe related to the city as a whole maybe related to downtown that you would support but that you think maybe the political establishment or the mare might not support and talked about parking meters and i had been i i differ very strongly from much of what the what the mayor is proposing there and his lack of public process and installing meters along grand avenue and i think that we need have for my entire career yes i worked for elected official i worked for of victoria right hard for lay that out there but for my integrity or been working in communities and working with organizing and making sure that we're you know of getting a lot of development happening downtown i'm concerned that we're not seeing the benefits of that throughout the neighborhoods and same all because of the amount of that that's caught up in taxi  roll over taxing government financing that should be when it should be retired and then and it ends up not being retired i'm an advocate for moving back of that you are having a much more honest tax policy you know when you bend down you're a twenty one years you've seen a lot i mean shootings and i mean all sorts of things on the safety skyways true there's a lot of people come downtown evenings and weekends they don't feel safe in the sky ways because there's so little activity most of the stores are closed up and one suggested and i do have is almost every building there are cameras monitoring in many of the buildings there are there is a guard on site some there aren't of course i think there should be an audio system attached to those cameras so when a guard notices some activity that perhaps should not be occurring and there are spear is a good thing out there called the skyway rules of conduct and a lot of people don't know that but you know the sky always a public right of way but you are supposed to have a destination in mind when you're going through the skyway so what i'm proposing is that you know like in my building i see something besides the weight on the floor and taken after around the corner from  gallery as a guard and see that they could say you know mr you know please get up you know and get to your destination it's a way of knowing people who are perhaps misbehaving too i know they're being watched and there's no confrontation between staff and the people who are perhaps doing things they shouldn't and if people knew that was going out i think it would make the sky would seem a lot safer and one other thing that i think needs to happen is for the central l light rail stations stop staring tower was put in there there's been some misbehavior associated with that there needs to be on that site right next to the stairs are there's a little triangle of lamp post you perhaps know of it better popping council on that land i believe they need to put in a security station there awaiting wilma and somebody shaking their head no i'm sorry there needs to be a security station there in a waiting room and public restrooms it make a world of difference for people taking that train down here because it's a long ride over here from minneapolis and there are metro transit officers monitoring that corner as most of you know daily year round that's a huge expense if there was a building there central station improvements those are really great i'd like to see you know maybe other you know other tools at our tool box how we address public safety you know like the big boma has the what are they call it the program where they provide opportunities for for you thing that they they see and this guy ways and in the transit stops do you know about that bill or do you what do you think about you know sort of programs like that that provide mentorship opportunities as well i'm not familiar with that but i can't know everything that's going on but the two things that i mention are achievable and in short order and there is a safety issue with the light rail and there is a safety issue on the skyways whether it's real or perceived even perceived is real to many people saw i think you mr house go it's your turn to ask the question now when you get to turn the tables  st paul there's a softball my so that's the ultimate softball you know so i grew up i was born divine redeemer hospital in salt lake hall which doesn't exist anymore i just recently found out i grew here sure well as i mentioned earlier i think that we need to be thinking about downtown not just as a place for people to come and go to amsterdam or go to see it just feel but also a place where people are living and raising children and i've actually talked to lots of people as i've been knocking on doors who are really interested in the schools that are downtown in the options that they're going to have also the schools right across the river on the west side and as you know i've been doing a lot of work to support and improve our website schools in fact i actually just came tonight from a very exciting community event that i was part of planning called west side wednesdays which is bringing the entire community into humboldt high school to support the school to see what it's like hopefully some downtown parents came and brought there maybe five or six year old and thought oh maybe this is some place that i could see myself sending m child in the future in terms of the bigger aspects of your question there and i mean i think that one of the reasons why i'm running for the seat i was a public school teacher i've worked my whole life supporting kids in my job and also as a mentor and a tutor and to me there's so much more that the city can do to support kids beyond just the seven hours a day that they're in school so whether our parks and rec centers and libraries are open when kids are actually going to use them whether or not the person who staff in that library that rec center knows the curriculum that that student in that grade is doing at that time and can support them with meaningful enrichment activities all of those things are things that the city and the school board can work together on as an example of a complete lack of coordination i was recently talking to somebody who said that he has spent the last ten years ten years trying to get the school board in the city to agree that every student in public schools should have a library card this was contentious and he just succeeded after ten years so that's an example i wouldn't want to do th question so my question for you is sort of the opposite of my question for darren actually it seems to me from what i know of your work that in many of the groups that you've been part of in a many of the work that the different kinds of projects you've done you've been seen as sort of a maverick and sometimes even a someone who's created a bit of dissension and in some of the groups that you've been part of including the capital river council and so i'm wondering as if you were to take office as the next city council member  there certain relationships with groups that you think you need to repair in order to build consensus and how would you go about doing that no one could find a quarter in my pocket you know i'm running for this job because i have a full life i love what i do i love this new business and like you know everything in the morning you know every day twenty one years i've been down here and my single thing is that you see this quarter and i brought this up at the last c city hall as a habit of showing you this corridor this side of it and they often don't show you the other side that's all i ever wanted to do for twenty one years is make sure you get full accurate information so that collectively you make decisions together and i have trust that the people of this war in this city will always back the right idea always ok i guess maybe i'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about some of that partnership that you think you might need to belt history aside in order to make progress for the party well when i was a board member on the capital recall so for three years  initiatives i had is that we allow the review and taping of the meetings of the c r c meetings as all district council meetings are they're largely publicly funded i introduced a motion that basically recreated the highland district councils policy  videotaping and it was passed by the board and then the executive committee in a closed door session overruled that motion from the back of the board and it was voted down you know this is your district council ladies and gentlemen if you can't make it to the meetings you should have a right to see what goes on from the comfort of comfort of your home or office that's one example i can give more mr osgood would you like to agree all right well that concludes the questions from the candidates and now it's time for the questions from you the audience and these have been handed up to be on note cards just looking at them here there's way more questions than we're going to have time for unless it's the series lightning round but we'll get there just as many as we possibly can and will take turns starting at mr tobel you go first on this one so given the nationally publicized event between christian lawley and the st paul police in the downtown skyway what do you invision can be done to improve the relationship between the same populace department and the black community you know this is a national conversation that's been going on and same hall needs to be on the forefront of this conversation that the current civilian revisit how the civilian review process is done and who makes up the board i think we should do that i think we need to do that and as a city halls of member i would make sure that we do that mr hosty thoughts on  longly skyway incident or just generally improving relations between the black community and the police i'm really sorry that incident happened i go through the first national bank through it occurred and i know the guards there and i think the guards aren't racist multi day ethnicities that are guards of that gas so i'm certain that situation happened perhaps what i mentioned earlier if there'd been an audi versus face to face with the gentleman maybe things might have been different you know i'm going to this the city we've had black police chiefs i mean we have a lot it's really shameful to me that waiting while black is a term that's come to define the situation in our city and given the gaps that i talked about earlier the employment gap the opportunity gap between white people and people of color unfortunately this is just one more of those of those gaps in treatment and it may not be and i don't think it is intentional but we do see the prevalence of these kinds of racist attitudes and behaviors i think there are a couple things that can make a difference with this and many of these things are ideas that the same properties are very much in favor of themselves one of those is community policing it makes a big difference and many people this audience maybe grew up in this if in the scenario where you actually knew the police officer who was coming down the street on the bea that's very different than somebody driving by in a patrol car coming by even a horse or a motorcycle so i would be very much in favor of making sure we have not caught to walk the beach and to get to know people who live in the community and i also think cultural competency training for officers that key and body cameras would really have helped us understand what happened in that situation better we were looking at a very fuzzy security camera i don't know i feel the cameras in general but i feel like a security camera certainly doesn't do a good enough job showing you what happened a camera what have and to put the officers that i've talked to are very much in favor of body cameras because most officers most of the time are doing the right thing and they also want to be held accountable when members of their court are not doing the right worried here's another question from the audience this one is one also about police issues downtown so it seems like there's more crime downtown recently and what do you plan to do to address them down  and also the other component is appearances matter and part of you know if you didn't get my flyer before you came in for the campaign please get what i'm way out of the city is really good about creating things and can be rather poor about maintaining things in some areas of downtown are quite beautiful and some areas are rather neglected people come down here and they see in the neglect and the gladness an oftentimes attract crime and so those are the three things the skyway the suggest that a broader earlier that central corridor or stopping is just here in the center there and there need to be better maintenance done here  place needs to look professional well cared for you know people are causing trouble they're not doing it from of the same home until they're not doing it from a public kitchen they're actually contacted the local patrol the downtown patrol to see if i could do a walk along with them in the skyways and sort of see for myself what was going on and i learned a couple things on that trip one is that if the cops ever offer to take you around on a seg a lot harder than it looks and i also learned that actually first of all it was pretty quiet in the skyways i think that sometimes the perception of crime is really exaggerated and i was really impressed by the professionalism of the law enforcement officers i was walking with and their relationships with the building security officers which i think is really important so that the building security officers know exactly what to do if there if there ever is a situation i think there are two specific things that would help with down time public safety one of those is the downtown improvement district and the ambassadors that i talked about earlier again i think if there are more people walking around more people wearing vests more people with walkie talkies you just inherently feel safer you feel like there's someone around to help if you needed it and then also the retail that i talked about earlier the eyes on the street the fact th matter is that when people are outside shopping having the time walking along fourth street a record happens to be that that's what makes other people want to come out and that just leads to a virtuous cycle of safety and of enjoying time outside downtown eyes on the street the other day agree with the with bill about technology improvements and making sure that our our skyway cameras are better and that they communicate between buildings and  knicker what will you do to encourage development of revealed and we heard people talking about retail what would you do to make it so i already talked about one idea for this which is the business concierge system and just to give a little more background on that i sit on the same pop planning commission i've been there for the last four years and that's given me a lot of experience that's actually pretty similar to what i'll hopefully experience on the city council making a lot of decisions that end up getting forwarded to the council to approve or reject and one of the things i've seen on the planning commission is how difficult it is for business owners to make it through the labyrinth of city hall and i talk to business owners downtown one for example who's trying to open a bar right about the old magic shop on the seventh street whose roof sat open for five weeks just rafters for five weeks while he waited to get historic preservation approval to put in a roof and again these are people who are trying to do business in our city trying to invest trying to enliven downtown sometimes even doing specific things that we call for in our small area plans that we say we want and then they're given it's just a complicated bureaucratic process to get it done so i think having someone at city hall that can help fast track those applications would really be helpful another option that we have is something called the business technical assistance program b tap it's a model again for minneapolis but it's been nationally recognized to help small business owners open their doors we have a lot of programs in same pot now that help security and some travelers in ecolab so open up but not quite as much that's going to and those aren't those are the store fronts that are going to enliven fifth or sixth street right we need the small grocery stores we need the candy lands in the review markets and those business owners can particularly benefit from something like the tap so that's also something i thank you very much mr turnbull to encourage more regional downtown yeah i would like to reform the planning and government element departments safety inspections well the have more of a costumer service model because again those people who are coming through they want to provide jobs downtown they want to provide vitality on the streets they want to do all these great things and it's only good for st paul to help them through this process to make sure that that actually happens so i want to but they also said how much harder it was over the st paul then experiences in albany and that other city that we don't talk about so we definitely need to make sure that we're changing our process and be more retailer for many years i just went through the whole process with the city for music for us kathy and frankly it wasn't that bad i mean i'd give it a eight out of a ten maybe even a nine out of a ten i think the key is when you when you you know you want to open a business down talent don't get ahead of the process i like ask questions and i told the schools i could do with various entities and bring in you know hire a plumber and a contractor and bring in an architect because i i can do city staff i mean you have to get permits and there's inspections and ask questions earlier mentioned the importance of maintaining you know is as important as creating and what is it we're trying to attract ok there's you know as i mentioned earlier there's a number of blocks down here that are not very appealing and i don't know how many of you would want to open a retail store in some of those spots but you know i just opened a retail store in an underutilized corner of a city parking ramp and i put plant result from i made it quite attractive if i say so myself retail opportunities here macy's i told you earlier it's so critical they do a right mix and they truly create a destination attraction there i see a lot of plants over the years and they start out well and then they kind of fade away so the reuse of macy's is critical i believe on the best qualified to be an office when that is fulfilled the palace theat is being renovated i've repeatedly encouraged spencer to make sure movies go in there the man is avoiding the subject and it just dumbfounds me because the people down here are the people who visit on your movies would rank i on their list of one thing they would like to see and he's opposing it and i said i mean a couple days while you're here negotiating the management contract he said i can't see until they're done negotiating i said are you negotiating that movies can be part of the mix independent arts types  work within the city and so this person wants to know whether you'll support that and i'm going to and also requiring as should the city get involved with work schedules and making employees get their schedules a certain amount of time ahead of time will you guys stand on these issues positive force in people's lives that live here is important and it's one of the reasons that it's the reason that i'm running for city council and i definitely look forward to advancing the rights  you know st paul is already perceived as being so anti business i mean there's just this perception out there in minneapolis in the economy it's just exploding and booming turns and all around us and you know we gain something we lose something over all the progress and it's positive  i'll be honest with you i'm not sure of the city should be dictating whether companies small large but particularly small should give more benefits than they're already giving the work force that they have i really am not comfortable saying in front of you tonight that the city should dictate with the benefit packages are between the the businesses in the city and their workforce and i think the government has a moral right and a moral responsibility to get involved when things like urns that can save time are being discussed i was talking to a daycare provider shortly after thanksgiving she works full time taking care of other people's children and i asked her how her thanksgiving was and she said she had to leave her own family right after dinner to go work at wal mart where she also works every weekend starting at four am in the pharmacy just to make enough to make ends meet for her own family so she takes care of other people's children all day every day and then works at four am at wal mart every weekend including on thanksgiving these sorts of practices are not good for business because they're not good for people businesses also need customers who are healthy who are safe and who are able to patronize them i've been in favor and sick and safe time from the very beginning in my d f l convention speech i talked about it equity and opportunity for people is truly don't anybody can look you in the eyes and say we can reduce crop pretty taxes but i believe i'm the best if you look at my history the one who's been arguing for years about return on investment when the city invests in things let's get the greatest return possible the more revenue you have coming into the city the less the there is to tax or add the increases to the people who live and own property here it's again it's going back to it's critical that macy's becomes a self sustaining major attraction for downtown to point people when people come here they spend money sales taxes are part of that and so that the number one we to reduce future property tax increases we've got to get people coming here spending money we can get people here investing money making downtown more attractive for businesses that that's that's knocking one of them if they are not phone banking so you're not a telemarketer bothering people when you're actually getting to meet people and one of the most exciting things about doing it this season has been that really fell many of the people i talked to especially downtown a lot of the younger people moving in with the people who maybe left the house in the suburbs to move downtown is there's this real optimism and excitement about where the city is going except when it comes to taxes and that's because we've seen our taxes go up every single year for the last decade and it's especially a little bit of salt in the wound when you also see our services not keeping up with our taxes so when you drive across marshall and it hits lake street and suddenly the snow is powered and removed and i'm sorry i keep making these references i'm going to stop it but  but public services really need to need to be outstanding especially if you're going to ask people to keep paying more so for me i think the way that you don't have to keep asking people for additional property taxes is to expand our tax base the only kind of land use that actually brings in more revenue to the city than it takes in services it's commercial industrial land and we already have a very built up city a third of our land is not taxable because it's government or higher ed or nonprofit so it's really important to me that whenever we have  terms so for seventeen years i've worked for ramsey county and worked for a county commissioner and when you get your property tax bill it has a little out ramsey county logo on it so i spend a lot of time thinking about property taxes i'm thinking about how this goes so i'm going to try to keep it to three it's probably going to get for the things i'm going to do it usually when i get to the end of this question of the door to five or six and another thing but i'm going to start with first we need to make sure that we work with other municipalities or cross the state to get the state to pay its fair share there's a thing called local government aid it is how the state offsets the taxes lost a lot in that happened over the course of this last you know fifteen years that people sort of use that benchmark of why my taxes have gone up and services have gone down so we need to make sure that we build that back up  secondly we need to we need to build we need to look at ourselves and look at efficiencies and how we budget and i think that we need to like bill said get return on our investment and actually track that return on  investment some of that one of the things that we've done at ramsey county is go to an outcome based budget model so that we can actually put what we're looking to get when we spend those tax dollars and then go back and say did we get that out of that investment and if we did how do we get in there so we're actually getting a we're actually can track the return on the investment we can also look at real efficiencies there are things like the enterprise computer system and how ramsey county pays its  bills and everything and how safe all these it's bills with computers all those school board or the school district does it and these systems cost like twelve million dollars each and we each buyer own the contracts come up around the same time about ten years ago we had this of the levy is a number it's a real number and the more people who are paying on that then the less we all individually pay so by having more taxpayers we each pay less taxes so it's important to look at our tax base also important to not to dial back the tax increment financing like i mentioned before if we're going to get we need to get the return on investment out of the out of the downtown development that's happening we need to dial back some of that actually financing what some of these districts retire and actually start using that money to decrease all of our property taxes that's good and that's actually a perfect segue into this next question which rebecca nick will start you make a big investment in a piece of property in the city once you make that investment and so they let your future property taxes kind of go to pay down the money they can put into building and skyscraper whatever lot of downtown st paul's in the tax increment district two pieces of paper one in each pocket and the first sad the entire world was created for me and the other piece of paper said i am dust and to dust i will return i think in st paul sometimes we have a little too much of the latter piece of paper in our pockets the whole point of that story is that you're supposed to balance a feeling of value and self affirmation and worth with a feeling of humility i think in saint paul right now it's a new day we're booming we have so much investment going on into such an exciting time we don't need to be making the kinds of giveaways that we've done in the past just to ensure that people come and develop here now there may be a situation where a particular parcel is incredibly hard to develop and we've seen cases like this on the planning commission where might make sense to give some public incentive for development but in general i don't think to financing is necessary anymore and i'm particularly opposed when we do things like with the analyst stadium forfeit property taxes forever on a parcel because we believe that's the only way that we can attract somebody to our city i think we're i think we're better than that now  important role oftentimes in development and the important thing is that it doesn't get over used and that we need to let those districts retire the problem is that some of those districts in the past or the recent past when they've come to retire just been rolled over and then made into sort of these amoeba districts sort of to pay for something else over here paper something else over here the other thing is in some of the some of the apps they ask for the entire amount of new taxes be paid back to the bonds where there's opportunities to say take some of the new tax revenue and put it in towards the smaller part of the financing i think the time when it's when it makes sense to use is a very difficult parcel or if there's a great public benefit outside of just that building when we're using it to enrich one particular developer then it doesn't make as much sense if we're looking at this is going to provide access to the river for everyone you know it's part of a part of a building but there's there's part of a private development but it has a great public benefit say like like river access or something like that and mr hoskins when if ever should we use tax increment financing to boost the grants occasion earlier mention the importance of the city issuing an annual report talk about the profits and the losses and yes there's a lot of development going on in and around downtown st paul but the truth is an awful lot of it's public money there's not a lot of private investment going time down here or in downtown minneapolis with the exception of the stadium it is seemingly the the west publishing site i'm i'm i'm still so sad that the colony is spending fifteen million dollars to destroy that building in the jail looking back the county should have never taken the property off the tax rolls when it took it from west publishing when you think of how many problem which property tax we've lost since that happened many years ago one of things i'd push with rafael or take a county commissioner is you're offering that building in the jail for free to a developer but you he did not want to offer a development money i asked him again and again if you're prepared to spread up to fifty million dollars to destroy them why won't you offer that money to a potential developer you never answer the question so that tells me he fully intended on destroying buildings so they're going to replace them with an eighty foot high concrete wall can be rather disturbing once it's all done and we take a look at it that site will likely require  o financing they're destroying seven hundred some thousand square feet to replace that amount of commercial square footage today's about two hundred dollars a square foot so bad as one side or to financing will likely be needed and  we're going to be i did want to try to squeak in one last audience question or a version of an audience question because it's very newsy it's very to dig down black lives matter st paul is planning to try to disrupt the twin cities marathon  miracleman i came out saying the police should keep all options on the table including arresting people or whatever it takes to allow the marathon to go forward what do you think should be done in that kind of push and pull between free speech  both able to read about the concerns and talk about it but the day did go on mr hosty was just talking to a gentleman up on summit have a know about this and i ran the twin cities marathon four times i i don't think the organization should disrupt a marathon that's not the best way to get a message across you know life isn't fair i don't believe that the people who run the city in the police department are racist you know many of you know i'm a gay man i've spent you know i'm just trying fifty three i've spent my entire adult life you know in the heart of the gay movement and that was also during the heart of the all the negative comments made about gay people by lot of politicians and i just think of all that the hurt it caused but never for a moment in all of these years did i ever allow myself to feel  because of that it's like if they have an issue with my being gay or other people being gay that's their problem it's not mine and the people with the black wives have a movement you know life's not fair people put here hurdles up in front of me they've said mean things to me as well never heard of my inner happiness or my inner spirit and i would encourage them to think about that and perhaps director of energies at a different event in the twin this nigger i have to say i regret the merest choice of words i think i think something like all options are on the table is a bit incendiary makes it sound like we're at war with our own citizens i believe black lives matter has the right to protest and i believe that the athletes in the marathon have the right to run a safe marathon and i put absolute faith i think our police officers have shown themselves to be to be professional and to be able to handle the situation so that everybody has a  well that brings us to the end of the audience question for some of the debate there's only one thing left to do which is a closing statement from each of the candidates to about two minutes with these give or take and we will begin with mr cos you know i mean i've been here a long time i know of this city well i love this city i've stayed here i just opened a second business and it's not it's losing money every day i'll tell you that you this was the money every single day music for us get paid after the election is over at that time to market it and it'll it'll do just fine i can tell you much i love the city that scrapbook collection i'd love to show you all the books that i have to say paul is a special city i think what makes it really unique is its geographic setting is just so remarkable the bend river and they tack about st paul being a city of neighborhoods and it's the geography that created that you've got all these valleys and these different areas and i just absolutely adore that about st paul and if you look at st paul architecturally few cities can compare they have such a breadth of outstanding architecture and what they were building particularly a century century goal is just tremendous today to look at it minneapolis is more of a flat plain over there you know that st paul's it's got that geographic history i remember a reporter for the pi and a tribune star tribune linda may actually be the architecture reporter she she called herself a closet saint paul like even though she had a really nice house around the lake of the isles of minneapolis and one of the things that she talked about a saint paul she said there's a sense that the history still exists in paul and that's true and i think that's one of places things that makes st paul so special if you look at the art that i've done i mean who would spend their career drawing and painting saint paul as i've done and i just felt compelled to do it no regrets and i don't know i'm having a good time campaigning meeting people dropping getting if you want signs old i think i coming here and sitting here this very important conversation i really enjoyed the discussion tonight but i always find these forums to be a little bit artificial because we set up here and we are expected to have all the answers and you have all the questions and the truth is that the next city council member for war two is not going to be the person who has all the answers if there's anything i've learned over the last two years of campaigning it's that i actually very very few answers the person who is successful in this seat is going to be the person who does two things listens extremely well and works incredibly hard those are two things that i have been doing for my entire life my entire career and this entire campaign in fact if you want to know how much a cup of coffee costs at any coffee shop and some tire city i can tell you because i've been to all of them having hundreds and hundreds of conversations i look forward to continuing to do that all the way up until november third and every day afterward and i hope that i've managed to persuade you tonight that i can be a fresh bold independent voice for our ward and i hope to earn your support thank you in the final closing statement to come from their own home well i too want to thank you for taking the time and sitting here and listening to us and hopefully we have your questions i'm sure we'll all be hanging out afterwards trying to answer more of your advice it's risen really exciting in this campaign it's really exciting in this opportunity to have was blessed with the four best neighborhoods in st paul it's easy to embroil go but these are these are the the greatest neighborhoods or the oldest neighborhoods in st paul i guess is a little bit on the side but there's the oldest neighborhoods in st paul it's downtown it's it's really i was really invited by the about this city so i want to make sure that you know that i'm here to work with you to build strong neighborhoods i want to make sure that we're providing all the services