lived there for about ten years and i decided to run for city council because i really love my town and i feel i can contribute a lot to it as an engineer as a parent as a veteran i have a lot vested in the community as you all do and i would like to be able to use my knowledge skills and abilities to help my neighbors that's primarily why i want to run in the first place and that's why i'm running today i decided that i was going to join the independence party about three years ago and become more involved with politics because i like their platform so it's a little unusual for someone from the independence party to run for office because we're not a major political party anymore this is a nonpartisan rice but i decided to run because their platform really resonated for me so i appreciate you all coming out tonight and i look forward to hearing from  council i greeted you in my language of the edge of way i'm a st paul kid who graduated from johnson high school and hold close to the words of my parents and relatives never forget where you come from pam and i are residents of ward five for over twenty years and our parishioners at maturity of marriage for almost twenty years my my wife pam and i ran a small coffee house and then built a cafe wedding business meeting concession business from scratch and still getting e mails and letters from past customers who had weddings and even business meetings that are that are new and at the new places now that they were gone now they were gone and they tell me what a great job we did and how great the food and service was we built it with long hard work hours bringing good people around us some of whom work by our side for thirteen fourteen seventeen years we were good employers and treated people with respect and dignity while i finished college i worked part time as a therapist at a dual disorder program with addicts alcoholics i'm also worked at three am as a marketing manager and for the past twenty years as a small business owner with over twenty five years of volunteer work on national state local boards and non profits like minnesota housing partnership the american indian chamber  commerce young center united way american indian is lodge association for enterprise opportunity the human rights commission and the national coalition against racism in sports and media i'm ready to bring that skill set to the city council i'll bring the same work ethic to the city council i brought to all of the non profits and board i sat on and also the same work ethic integrity and honesty as owner of a successful small business that catered to building community with free community meeting rooms and a free traditional thanksgiving business thanksgiving dinner every year when he wanted to stop i know how to roll up my sleeves put on my work and go to work i'm ready to do that as you know ward five city council representative great well good evening and thank you very much for being here tonight i see a lot of wonderful warm faces out in the crowd i want to think the district's community council and the league of women voters for organizing this my name is amy brenneman and i'm the current council member for ward five i've lived in st paul for about nineteen years and my home is in the wonderful south como neighborhood i'm here tonight with my three awesome kids who i can't see in the crowd anymore so all they're three are so you're talking to lars who all attend same public schools i grew up in a single parent home with my mom and sister we were broke we moved a lot but the last up and down we were really a team my life's journey has taught me to be resourceful to be flexible to be collaborative and to be appreciative and grateful i ran four years ago to bring new energy this curiosity and a female voice to the city council i promise to be accessible i promise to enfranchise the community and i promise to be a leader through community office hours one hundred hundred fifty miles of labs calls meetings e mails facebook i have listened to you i've met you i've heard your dreams i've heard your fears i've heard your concerns and i'm really honored to serve this very diverse and wonderful ward am proud of what we've accomplished together in st paul i believe our neighborhoods and sample are moving in the right direction together we have advance major planning and construction work and railroad islands together we're investing in twelve new single family homes in the north and together we save the homes of seventy five of our most vulnerable at como by the lake every day is a challenge but every day is also an adventure i have to live it on my promises but i am not done yet i am seeking a second term to build on this momentum that we have started and i won't stop until every neighborhood is livable every neighborhood is vibrant and every neighborhood is safe thank you i look forward to the debates thank you do we have the questions and then david sullivan sullivan nightingale the question is how will you involve people of color in city governance so it's important that st paul does a better job in bringing people of color in the not only city government but in all aspects of our community and how we work in how we interact with each other and how we make decisions you know just a few months ago the st paul pioneer press wrote a story about the district councils and the lack of diversity within some most basic level of you know community government and in the in the story line was is that it wasn't representing the communities of color very well here in ward five we actually have the highest percentage of people of color in the immigrant population more so than any other part of the city it's important that we do that as an issue not as a american indian i share a lot of the same values and traditions as the hmong community we've been good friends over the many many years i worked with closely with the n w a sepi african american community with the pan asian communities with the new immigrant communities one of the one of the one of my big supporters officer mark pickett intake you know police officer the year i was named that because of his outreach into the into the communities you know i'll visit in the i will encourage and i'll make room in help to make room for that kind of participation at all levels of government in the city in also in our communities amy i think that in order to be inclusive of community of colors and good community of colors engaged in all aspects of local government and beyond it needs to be part of everything that we're doing every minute of every day i can i can i sometimes had a friend one time to talk to me i've been a feminist since i was born and everything i look at i look at through a gender equity lens and a friend of mine said you know if you extend that a step further and add those same questions about equity that you're asking about gender equity you can be a great advocate for all communities of color some examples of things that i've done in my short for years and in city council are really being a champion for equity in the way that we deliver our city services we have a complaint base model of service delivery from police which makes some sense but also our department of safety inspections and other city services require that we complain to get services overworked and unfortunately as a result some time that results in areas with means get less degree of service than areas with that have more challenges so we've as a every day i work to try to deliver equity in the delivery of city services in addition to that at every opportunity i have tried to make recommendations for ours are important boards like star and c i b and parks commission to be women and women from communities of color and representatives from community of color successfully i participated in the fire fighter diversity task force to make sure that we were expanding our base of who we were recruiting to fight or to be our fire department i worked with the mayor's office and had some scuffles with my council members to insert term limits on our own powerful boards felt like we could not have diversity in our boards if the people in those positions of power never turned over so we've added some term limits to that in addition i've had community officers in the community as well as at the elder care center and at the current organization in minnesota with translators to encourage people to participate in their own language and in their own place and have taken every opportunity to mentor girls especially girls of color to encourage them to have a voice in politics well i've looked at this problem before because it's important to me one of the first things i proposed was increasing increasing the size of the city council by four members to include two new wards in two at large members so to inherently fix the problem we need to increase the number of represent the number of representatives on the city council with the seven members we have that leaves us with roughly forty two thousand people to represent for each ward in our work that's fifty five thousand people so we're above average population that would increase the number to eleven council members w actively recruit minorities for that planning councils we made progress last year in our neighborhood two members of our community stepped up bers or community who have been involved for a couple years are now in the district six planning council we also groom young leaders like the ones in the back of the room there and get them to return to our community once they have graduated college so a well educated workforce coming back will be our leadership of the future and they're going to be coming from this school i hope since norm coleman's time i worked with leadership from all of our different communities in promoting expanded contracts for people of color and women owned businesses in the steel today in s paul we have less than you know fifteen percent of contracts that are laid out go to minority and women owned businesses we can do in not only can we do a better job we have to do a better job it's still you know today we're still lagging far behind the norm in terms of those kinds of contracts and better contracts on and i would just challenge that i think that we can always do better with our outreach to minority owned businesses women owned businesses and increase the number of contacts that we but i do i believe that the facts show that we've met or exceeded goals that have been set by our human rights organization and those that data is on the city's website and projects as recent as you know recent projects that we've done such as the  will you vote yes or no on the grand avenue parking meter issue explain your answer well that seems to be a question that only one person here can answer right public hearings with an open mind i have been meeting with residents and businesses from the grand avenue area and i have to say i'm not convinced that parking meters are not are absolutely impossible are not a but i do believe that in order for them to work on grand avenue there needs to be buy in from the residents and from the businesses on grand avenue and right now that's clearly doesn't exist so if for example the vote was tomorrow i would  now would you explain your answer i don't want to have to pay a couple bucks to buy an ice cream cone for maisie's or you know get some cinnamon from the local store there now that's that's awfully expensive for a quick trip that's going to hurt businesses for sure i can see it downtown i think i looked at downtown and compared with the prices  for you know ten twenty dollars to park downtown it makes sense you know if you're only stopping in for an hour pay a buck and then go into a restaurant come out but it doesn't make sense and grand avenue the economics really don't work o so it doesn't make sense on grand avenue it doesn't make sense on race street arcade cesar chavez any of the streets that the council and the mayor has put forward this is just another example of the mayor and the city council shoving projects down the citizens of st worlds at the expense of local citizenry meanwhile giving millionaires the three largest the three riches guys in the state of minnesota one hundred million dollars tax break over twenty years means does it really make sense i don't think it does you know we need to gets we need to listen better to the citizens of st paul instead of talking down to them we need to hear what they have to say not only with regards to parking meters but any of the other issues that come before us that affect us and business owners in the city of st paul they have been doing that ignoring us and else now will go on to question three and in this sorter david sullivan nightingale david glass and amy brenner moment how do you implement goals equality and community you implement goals equality and community engagement within your election and the response does that help your support or make it questionable for police brutality  concerns in this city ok so one of the goals i was looking at was considering the goals of black lives matter because those are the ones that were fronted to the d f l and they didn't come to our convention but i took it seriously and read through the material and it seems reasonable and in fact the president president obama implemented some of those goals by not giving the police force main battle tanks doesn't make a whole lot of sense to give the police force main battle tanks or bradley fighting vehicles the please the police are not at war with the community and the police don't want to be at war with the community secondly i looked at all the engagement that had previously with the national association for the advancement of colored people and they weren't to zing gays to some of our other community leaders and that that was unfortunate because there's a lot of great leadership at the end up in a c p a here in st paul a lot of wisdom that could be gained so i was trying to figure out and try to get a cut get a hold of them in order to sit down and talk with them and they chose not to meet with me or any other member of the independence party and i haven't gotten a response so given the opportunity tonight they wanted to listen to what they had to say i also let him listen to what the police department had to say and there is a lot of common ground there and i looked at what my goals and the goals of the community were and they're not incompatible in fact they're very compatible and i think if we just sit down with each other and have a good long talk a serious talk about race a serious talk about racism and discrimination and what we can it was important to include everybody in ward five low voter turnout areas which typically are disenfranchised impoverished communities in the and i needed in even though i had well meaning people in my strategy team from ward five and said you have to focus on the west side of the this is where all the voters are it was important for me to to walk walk the talk and i spent a lot of time money side i spent a lot of time in north then i spent a lot of time on race street and i spent time on the west side but i've been in those i'm i've been in the apartments and i've been having meet and greets and people's backyards all throughout the ward meeting with folks from all different walks of life from all different income levels from all different communities cultural backgrounds and that's important for this campaign because when i if in it if i'm blessed to be able to be elected to represent ward five i'm going to do the same thing at the city council we're all there together as a community we're not there just for one section of our community and one part of the city of st paul and the guards to my my friends in the at the st paul police force and i'm you know i'm honored that that they've endorsed me and i'm told it is the first time in their history that they pulled indorsement from an incumbent and gave it to the challenger you know i respect the work that these folks do every day and every day that i see a uniformed police officer i walk up and think i'm from the work that they do in our community and i think everybody should do that are there some goofballs and bad apples in every industry in every in every business that we have but for the most part our people in st paul our folks in blue do a fantastic job i for one do not understand why anybody on the city council in the in the six ten years that i've been watching closely have never ever think the st paul pub please the simple police  thing that i'm seeing in the new is that involve racial inequity questionable police behavior questionable crowd behavior the reports in the paper about violence in schools the mass shootings make me incredibly sad they make me incredibly scared and and they make me feel hopeless sometimes but in my job as a city council member i feel like it's my responsibility to is learn as much as i can  to understand where people are coming from and have to try to figure out ways that i can connect and help in the very small purview that i have and try to expand it as much as i possibly can to that and i i have i truly agree with mr glass about and franchising i mean i too when i first campaign was startled at the difference in voter turnout from one side of the war to the next and have probably spent far far too much time in the non voting part of the ward because i just know how much that that part of the world needs help in investment opportunities education support on the other morning i went to breakfast at a place which is a nonprofit that works with with young african american men to recidivism and did they do counseling support housing support education support and give folks hoping to get them on the right path but in addition to that i've been out with our police department in the field i have went out with all three of the districts that are and more and five and spent time with them one on one to understand what it's like to walk in their shoes and to get an understanding of how it can be supportive there and also just in our own city services like with the library and rec centers what are we doing there and how can we do better to to to close that gap and provide people to support and housing and and hope that they need to walk mark doesn't do this point self but so many of our other police officers have these different events throughout the summer these little picnics these hot dog deals and they do it different parks around the city of st paul they bring out the the horses and they and they have all kinds of events to make that out reach out to our communities and i want to applaud them for taking the those efforts we do such a fantastic job and indeed we have some hiccups here and there yes we do but nothing compared to the rest of the larger any further rebuttals or comment all right the next question will be addressed by first david glass amy brenneman one and then david sullivan what would you do to help st paul schools that are in crisis paul schools are in crisis you know i was one of the first candidates to stand up and in sign on with the caucus for change caucus for change is a movement that is growing rapidly since its inception of october two thousand and fourteen in the reason that it became so popular is because the what's happening in our st paul schools today is pretty appalling i mean just  o over at harding got punched in the face after a mealie meal in our in our in our own community and at como senior high we've had three riots since school started that's crazy you know the what what has been implemented by the superintendent in follow through by the school board is absolutely the wrong way to move with our kids and when i'm not going on doors i'm here and folks who are telling me that the they're going to move they're moving from st paul they're sending their skids to kids to other schools what when we start losing high schools in our neighborhoods we're starting to lose st paul when i'm elected if i'm elected as a council person i will work closely with school board members especially in my ward with schools to help bring them back up and in in pull together programs that that affect all the citizens in not only our ward but throughout st paul that all the schools are in trouble and the sooner in you know the mayor and the city council have yet to identify that we have a problem in st paul schools i think we're going along swimmingly asked the protests the parents who have students in our schools they know we're in trouble well i have three boys in the same public schools so i pay attention to what's going on in the school district and i share concerns i also share a lot of joy and excitement with what i hear coming back from both the elementary school junior high and high school that boys are attending i do know that the the school board or the school district and the city of st paul are fairly separated when it comes to  policy and and our overlap is really an after school programming and into an extent you know what the way we connect with sprockets and some of those those programs and i i definitely think that we can always work harder on making our doing what we do in our overlap better but i wanted to say that the the large mob violence which is which is terrifying especially if it's something that you present to see is something that our police department has been working to stop for several years when i first took office there was a horrible incident with after many of these fights where a young man r was beaten within an inch of his life and our police have worked very hard to interrupt to learn how to to in partnership with our wreck department to to be on site when when they were reading social media they know something is go happen and try to break it up ahead of time and i've been successful in moving a lot of that that violence out of our park system so i guess the first thing i would do it because the word i heard is crisis and i think in crisis it's great to talk about an election and a long term change of our our school board and our governance policy but what we really need to do is get the school district working hand in hand with our incredible police department and figure out what is work for us and what we can use for their successes to employ in our schools thank sullivan currently my my kids aren't in the public school system they're home school so i wanted to disclose that says no no secrets there you know my wife's a teacher has been for many years we support the public schools and most of our neighborhood kids go to the public schools and we want to see it improved i went to cherokee for a while in  the west side and the schools are pretty rough back that and they've improved considerably but they've gone downhill according to the parents i've talked to in the last few months and you know we would not put our kids in the public school system right now and there's a good reason for that and i think we do need new leadership and i will be voting that new leadership personally on november there so propose is that we have to joint sessions between the council and the school board on the annual basis and that's not just to meet in the morning and go home and say that we met but we'll plan for our team members w plan for weeks in advance we should we will meet for two days we all come to the same pot of money and it's called taxpayer dollars right it's funding all these things and city of st paul we need to work together rebuttal and this question will start with miss brenda moan then david sullivan nightingale and then david glass and the topic is affordable housing how would you address the affordable housing issue given that the north and east side neighborhoods in ward five already have an overabundance of affordable of naturally naturally affordable housing imagist point to one really specific example when as the chair of the housing and redevelopment authority i have some control over something that it's a score card for an allocation of tax credits and the tax credits are worth about ten million dollars and they're for low income housing when i was able to look at the the scorecard and saw what what proposals we've funded in the past year it seemed to me that we were we were continuing to invest money in areas that were already heavily occupied with affordable housing and low income residents and not putting affordable housing in areas of means and i wanted to have a scorecard that worked on improving existing affordable housing in areas that were challenged and renovating them we took out i think the word was we would change it to fully renovate instead of preserve for like we don't want to just preserve it we want to do we want to be fabulous in that area and then if there's going to be new money to new construction it should go on an area that is not challenge then an area where there's opportunities for folks to launch more easily and we went from a two hundred seventy five point scorecard to a sixty five point scorecard that really weighted on those two projects and i mean it's been very interesting in the in the first use of that card to see how it changes the what kind of projects come in i think it's very very important that we provide affordable housing for folks especially as our population ages so it is a top priority for the council i can speak for for most members of the council it's a top priority for them and in a top priority to expand that housing into areas of means and to to fully renovated in areas where there's more challenges some of them are not and some of them are immediately habit which means a family could move in right away and some of them are not on the market which is a travesty because they're just sitting there vacant and nobody knows about we need think h the banks the loan companies to make sure that they're turning these houses over quickly and putting them on the market we need to streamline that we need to utilize all vouchers this year so that we can put those homeless vets into those houses and we need to make sure that homes are safe by doing more frequent inspections to make sure they're up to up to speed because they're dragging down the values in our neighborhoods but that's what we need to do is to class and sit on the board of the minnesota housing partnership in partnership conven and supports the diverse set of partners working to improve conditions of homes and communities they strengthen development capacity and promote policy to expand opportunity especially for people at the lowest income levels so i have a little experience here in ward five in certain areas of ward five especially in the north and in east east and feel in areas you know we have a surplus of affordable housing in some it's really pretty poor shape you know and there's a variety of reasons for that folks who are buying those home sometimes are buying it through predatory lending practices and they're unprepared for homeownership in some of the homes that are out there  are over our cost over burden to the family in meaning that their mortgage that they pay or their pain over thirty percent of their income to keep a home and it's it's a tough thing to do we need to have a better mix of affordable housing and rich in a market rate housing throughout especially the north end in in right street in the east side and when we do that we'll have more stable housing we'll have more stable neighborhoods it's important though that we continue to to encourage homeownership because i believe that's really what is the basis for safe in unstable neighborhoods so we have some work to do  you any further comment i want to stress hard to go first wow i did i did want to say that we had at the citywide peak there were twenty four hundred homes vacant and we are well under a thousand today i think they said at a recent budget meeting that about three or four hundred is typical in a city our size so we're really we really are getting there but the city's a jury has invested tens of millions of dollars in an inspiring communities program to get those boarded up homes back on the tax rolls and into homeowners and sometimes renters hands with it when it's renters it's with caviar it's on that ownership so are the landlords who are to provide that affordable housing and maybe incentives for people to do some saving save up for a down payment so as i've been door knocking this season i've noticed lots of less houses that are boarded up and lots of houses that have been fixed up and repaired and in critical areas that as for investment on the further for the next question we would start with mr sullivan mr glassman mr brown a moment why did the city of st paul wait until the black bear crossing lease ran out instead of breaking the lease thus costing the city eight hundred thousand dollars i can't answer that question sorry i don't i don't know so i guess i'm not surprised that the black bear question comes up because periodically at the doors it comes up but not all that often you know the fact of the matter is that the city of asked the city of st paul asked black bear back in the year one thousand nine hundred nine to put a plan in to do business at the billion and invited us to do it we did that and they picked us in that gave us a ten year contract in two thousand and nine my wife and i were planning to leave the pavilion to go on to our own new chapters in life my wife's hard science teacher and she was going to teach and i was going to go on to do my economic development stuff with tribes and small businesses two thousand nine were just came out of a recession a tough tough tough tough recession the city came back and asked us if we would sign up for another ten years and we actually said no you know after four days of constant asking i finally said to the city look you guys really don't want to do this if we even considered it i rewrite the contract and they said well let's let's see it and i said you're not going to like it you know you won't like this new contract he said let's do it so i rewrote the contract and i'm going to tell everybody it was a sweetheart deal for black bear it really was known that's not a lie but the city had a contract five years later i had a discussion with council member brenda one about a remodel that we were going to do we drew up plans i met with her and her boyfriend at the time m him the plans and you know i'll mystified and i'm still i still don't know why the city did not let us continue in through twenty eighteen with our lease we  multiple times throughout two thousand and thirteen we agreed to changes in the contract we were doing a remodel of one hundred sixty thousand dollars and it gets lost in the discussion and so i'm not sure unqualified success both financially and for the community but i but the question that you're asking is about why the city didn't let someone else is why the city didn't wait five years instead of terminating  think it's important to clarify a few bits of misinformation shared by mr glass one is that the conversation about the lease started when mr glass showed up asking for an extension of his loan for ten years please for ten years so he could secure a loan for remodel and i think at that time the city was interested in and in having some improvements to the space if there was going to be any talk of lease and it quickly devolve to can you do a little more just a little bit more and the answer was no i'm going to sue you it's unfortunate that this situation turned into an absolute three ring circus it could have been resolved in the conference room has generated over a million dollars of which thirteen percent comes back to the city in the summer and nine percent in the offseason i hear the term it's just a bar thrown around i think that's lazy rhetoric i was there yesterday for breakfast it was a full service breakfast there were seniors having coffee there was grandparents with their kid there's a packed room moms group i looked out the window and saw a pumpkin patch with a hay ride and i read a sign that there was an upcoming farmer's market this place is alive it's a community center and folks are happy like i said the party is settled it's settled and it's time to move on older leave school girl was the end of the farm it's a time for applause not during the questioning and we have a rebuttal from mr glass and i'm going to say this have i have evidence that her and i started talking about this in october of two thousand and twelve i'll be more than happy to share that conversation e mail with anybody who would like to see it all right i also have as one is and you can pull it from thirteen we sat in a meeting with amy my attorney in my attorney in nathaniel khaliq and we thought we had an agreement when we signed that agreement and sent it back in  any further thank you the next question mr glass will go first miss brennaman and then mr sullivan knight knight gale as an elected council member following the election how will you work with the mayor and the rest of the city council to keep the focus and investment in ward five as an elected council member how will you work with the mayor and the rest of the council to keep the focus and investments into ward five a great question because we haven't been doing that for the last three and a half years all of a sudden and this at the end of the as we get near an election cycle we have all this kind of money that i know is coming into ward five for three and a half years we've had nothing going on take a look at roy street in north in absolutely no investment meanwhile the downtown area has spent something like two hundred forty million dollars worth of investment all of the money that we're spending in the city of st paul is happening downtown nothing is happening here in ward five you know a council member brenneman when she ran last time said that she was going to make sure that the that the investment in the worked in stop at the central corridor that it would come in towards by we're still waiting for that to happen iowan dollars over at the front and dale we haven't seen any of that yet that talk is cheap and what she's been doing in ward fifes from from the very beginning is there is there's been a lot of talk with no action so as a city council person with my business expertise in my ability to network and my relationship building i'll be able to make those deals happen i'll be a cheerleader here for ward five for rice street in north and make things that's brennaman well i am thrilled about all the things that are happening and we're five and i and i actually agree a little bit with mr glass that it takes a little while to build something when there's really nothing in the pipeline when i started in four years ago there was there was very little that was like in the queue for me to do it so they're sold stuff does take a little time to come to fruition but that said my aid came and i said down and started writing a list of of achievements and not just monetary projects of which there are many but you know small accomplishments and we ended up having to like cut and cut and cut on a piece of paper because there was too much great stuff things in the rec department like getting the wilder rec center off of our brother rec center staff and programming doubled and tripled getting a new play area funded from mary bell park the sylvan play area in partnership with district six we have a brand new soccer field of more than a million dollars an investment there we've got money for the north an economic development fund worked very hard to secure a police training facility and ward five and i'm excited to see that that planning is also underway  we have the the right street library when under renovation we've got we got the largest award for star grants for a new bangkok type deli on rice street just very recently  identify that as as a commercial zone and work was started on that this fall and in addition to that while we talked about they have a test for humanity development that project you know shovels in the ground and and not next year but that's a project that we're currently working on and designing to make sure that we can meet the needs for the people who live in that who will live in those habits at homes but exciting stuff is happening all over from rain gardens to community gardens to a mural isn't public art it's exciting time work by mr sullivan nightingale well i've had an opportunity to work with a lot of executive leaders in government and i can't say that i've worked with a mayor before but i've worked with quite a few generals at the pentagon and let me tell you there's a lot of prima donnas out there met miracleman is not not like that actually he's he's he's a different kind of leader he needs encouragement sometimes  him on a tour of the north then in we used to call this the leadership walk means you go through and you stick your nose where you usually don't like to stick it where you're going to find problems where you're going to find trouble and you're going to go out looking for it and you're going to find trouble when you do this that means we need to visit the jefferson smurfit site which has been sitting vacant for far too long we will turn that from a short from a long term goal in short term goal and i know the district six planning council really like that we also need to do walk through is where people live we have a lot of hazards on the north end and some of them are getting fixed but we're learning the hard way we need to be learning the easy way by getting our boots dirty again or boots on the ground and doing a walk through some of these apartments and visiting people you know my pastor has been through has been through hell and back and he's told me a lot about his visits to his communities into the chicago area when he was a young minister and he's been some terrible places we need leaders like that to get into places where quite frankly many of us in this room don't want to go or the police go every day you want to go places deliberately but the fact of the matter is we need to look out for our neighbors means occasionally helping them along i think i got so excited to talk about a list of accomplishments that i forgot that really your question was about your relationship with the mayor and that and ministers and deputy mayor and your council council colleagues i want to just be clear i  definitely not someone who i would describe as a cheerleader i do dig in and do the work with thanks for reminding me about this when with the mayor and the deputy mayor and the new chief of staff and my colleagues i make regular effort to meet with them and walk them around the ward and even took some of my colleagues and bike rides around the word to get kind of a slower speed observation of what our challenges are and what our successes are and i think that in order to be successful in the city as a council member and a strong mayor system that it is important to build strong relationships with that administration and when to fight and know when to compromise because you really can't get anything done if everything you do is a fight and a further re city well that's a that's a good question i think that the goal is always to have processes be as transparent as possible i was mentioning earlier when we talked about the grand avenue parking meters i think even the mayor's office is agreeing bungled that that process but in order for anything to be successful it's very important that there's buy in from the stakeholders a great example of that and a process that i thought was wonderfully transparent was the  proposal at the will reserve our maryland home site we had a site that it set vacant for many many years in anticipation of a thirty to forty unit walk up apartment building and  had the opportunity for the city to take over that parcel of land and to work with the community to determine what we wanted to build at that site the community we set up a community based steering committee the steering committee put together a  request for interest we sent out the requests for interest and got proposals back in when we reviewed all the proposals the committee members said we don't like any of the proposals so we've decided rather than try to move forward without by and we would go back to the drawing board i personally reached out to sue haig soxer about bringing habitat for humanity in and they were very excited about the prospect of having home ownership which is what the neighbors in the community wanted to see in that location ownership that could be accessible built on accessible ownership that could be for a larger families and they met with the community and the community was bought and we are moving forward with that project next spring do it a few houses at a time and one of the things i'm really excited about with habitat is their penchant for really getting community involved and doing some needed community building around that housing project in the north end and i thought that was a great example of getting buy in and having transparency from  sullivan there's something that we do in private industry which isn't always done in government and one of the most important things that was implemented a few years ago within the federal risks independently of agencies and activities that we're trying to provide oversight over and i think that's another thing missing from state and local government including our government and all the city council is supposed to be doing this they may not always be equipped to do this activity so i would institute independent oversight over quality in safety i would also revise data retention policies to align better with best practices in government and industry and we can do this i don't know i have a degree in electrical engineering field of study so i can certainly help data retention policies are not foreign to to the state government they currently do a good job in some in some departments even our universities have data retention policies i don't know why we can't align with some of the best practices in industry today but for accountability and this it's the primary role of the city council to hold the city services accountable for their actions and that's what i would do integrity honesty you know today most of the work that's done by the city council and votes taken are done on a wednesday afternoon at a closed session  with the consent agenda so everything is what it is consent agenda council passes it nobody can the only people that it can bring a certain item on of the consent agenda would be the council member in the other the only people who can talk about it so if you're there as a private citizen in the city of st paul you wouldn't be able to speak to the issue at all that's the way we do business today most of the work that we've done with regards there's been no one in we're lucky when the when the newspaper decides to report on them even if they even find out about it you know consent to gender as are supposed to be two x x but at the conduct of business in order to allocate more meeting time to discussion of substantiative issues and since agenda items should be routine matters that are non controversial we have a backwards here at the city of st paul in our council with the mayor we really do you know we can do better and we should do better the the st paul strong which is just announced their their platform last week is all about ethics responsibility accountability transparency honesty in government my good friend ruby hunt ninety one year old ten years on the city council president our city charter she was the author she agrees with me thank you any further that's brenda i agree that transparency is incredibly important but i am going to take a moment to correct some misinformation again from mr glass first of all there are no close council sessions at three thirty on wednesdays there are open council sessions at three thirty on wednesdays where we do mundine city business every other wednesday at five thirty we have open public hearings where we tackle our controversial items and they're open to the pub is that go on the consent agenda are supposed to be items where there is no controversy there are times when i don't end up on the consent agenda that don't belong on the consent agenda and they're removed so they're there for example there if there are settlements from our h r department for work workers comp they might be on i mentioned ruby hunt president of the city council back in the seventy's she was the author of the city charter that we are governed by today city council and mayor you'll have to google really hunts name in the pioneer press and go back to the editorial that you wrote some four or five months ago discussing the role of the city council with regards to transparency in the work that they're doing and she took them to task for not doing the work with regards to the to the charter in the kinds of things that to should be doing in terms of auditing investigating and holding the mirror cannibal so i would challenge you to go take a look at that article from ruby and make your own opinions thank you i'm afraid that all of the questions we'll be able to get to and we got through only a small fraction of those you turned in i will be reading every one of the questions that we didn't ask at the following the closing statements so shall we begin the closing statements as brennaman will go all right we we will go tell eight thirty happier then the next question that i had all right i found it and mr sullivan nightingale will go first and mr glass and ms brown i'm on what is your position on a major league soccer stadium in st paul and would you work to have a women's team in st paul as well as a men's team i studied this but a month ago when a book came out about stadiums nationwide and not all stadiums are created equal each each is in its own environment and has its own dynamics and its own economies of the city where this stadium is located i'm not sure it's a good design to put a large stadium like this at a major intersection  that being said i don't like the idea of giving tax breaks based off of size of the company that you're running so i don't agree with giving tax breaks to bigger companies over little companies in fact that's that's not the independence party position that's not my position i believe in treating each company fairly and equitably and i don't think that's a good policy for us to be doing it that being said i do think we need to invest in soccer equally for both men and women and not just soccer but other team sports here in the twin cities  need to encourage women to exercise and to participate we've been discouraging them for for too long i think that's deplorable that it's a problem that affects us in the military where we don't have men and women coming out of the public school system that have the same type of physical training i think we need to work on title nine issues across the board and that needs to apply to professional sports all the way down to preschool and we need to implement programs that encourage women to participate in sports and games just as much as we do the men called marginal returns you know we're going to reach a certain saturation point with with the major league teams here in the metro area that it's just going to become unsustainable for some right that's going to happen having said that you know i said this to bill mcguire at a dyess that we had it about two months back i said it at the hearing the screening we had at the strip a couple weeks ago that the city of st paul is going to push ahead and do this project and give a tax break to the three wealthiest men in the state of minnesota to the tune of one hundred million dollars over twenty years we need to get something back in return really we need they need to give back and i suggested to bill mcguire is that they've built ten new soccer stadiums for youth in the most disenfranchised impoverished areas in the city outfit him put nets up balls hold clinics classes build their fan base from the bottom up and then every year build two more that's not a lot of money for these guys especially with the kind of tax breaks are getting meanwhile we're not giving any tax breaks or providing any dollars to small business growth in th and the real only good thing would have done to have some business planning and do a feasibility study to understand you know the future what the market is with regards to all these teams we didn't do that well i just start by saying that i'm really proud of our high school boys soccer team those when i read that just the team that they had in them the multiple cultures represented on the team the multiple languages spoken and the successes they were having i was sucked in and so proud when they won the state tournaments and continue to be a leader in soccer actually for boys and girls at the school and i'm also really pleased that we were able to secure funding with c i to redo the field at sylvan potentially even with synthetic synthetic field so that it can be used earlier and later in the spring i don't drive past there without seeing kids from all walks of life playing and enjoying themselves i see it as an accessible sport cross site which include the only request that we have heard is to take ten acres of the thirty five acre site and keep them off untaxed but the council resolution was like it was said that in exchange for that that the other twenty five acres would need to be activated and falling on the tax rolls and part of a thriving development project there of course i'm not a fan of tax breaks for the privileged but i also think that to the extent i know that still this would activate a site that's been vacant for ever and it's in a wonderful location and the idea of bringing soccer and bring in that area to life is is very exciting very exciting to me and i think the devil will be in the details who want to do a good deal want to do a deal it doesn't cost the taxpayers a ton of money it also brings a lot of benefit to both that stadium area and the surrounding acreage that will be at thank you any further mystic last i'm just going to see the do this is that the you know the tax breaks isn't the only thing it's going to cost the city of st paul the taxpayers the stadium goes in the infrastructure rebuild over there parking parking ramps that is going to have to be picked up by the city of st paul we're going to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars it's just you can't plug a stadium down on that site in pretend that it doesn't need anything else city st paul has a has a has a reputation of not doing any kind of business planning with any of these projects that are huge that cost us money and then they continually have cost overruns c h s stadium midway stadium the same stadium is one of those projects that has gone now as a cost overrun of near thirty million dollars rebuttal i would have one thing to add if we do have a stadium there i strongly suggest putting an outdoor hockey rink in during the winter time because if we're going to use of the might as well use it for a favorite sport here in minnesota any more ok this question will start with david glass second amy brenneman third david sullivan nightingale and the topic is team or can you each say something positive about your opponent respect well let me start with miss the gentleman to my right the it would solve them you know i've never met david before he and i met him for the first time at the  star tribune offices in and he was you know he's very engaging and a gentleman in you know his background and his schooling in the issues that he wants to parade in this mother at first wouldn't shake my hand she said my son is running against you and i and i said to his father i said well i wish him the best of luck and he looked at me he said you mean that and i said yeah i mean i wish him the best of luck i mean this is an easy thing to do in and being able to pull herself up in and be where she is today that you know i give her credit for that in applaud that and i wish her the best of luck in whatever that she pursues  brenda thanks for this question i actually try to make a habit of finding things that i like and respect about people that i work with all the time i think it's helpful in politics especially where things can get challenging and ten times sometimes  i'll start with mr glass i one thing that i have always really admired about him is his clear love respect and admiration for his wife i see again and again and read material how he brings her name to the forefront and talks about how they work as a team in a partnership and i think that that's a wonderful thing and i think and hope he understands how important it is for people to have a life partner that's that that's that's a partner with them and so i respect that and i like that  i feel whatever the outcome of the selection is there's some things in there that i really think are important particularly your observation about the large wards we serve i mean our council wards are two thirds the size of the  city it's huge number of people and i even you know i hear sometimes people say i haven't seen my council member on my door before it's like gosh you know levy and janice and jim and everybody and you guys who are all up they're knocking but you just can't get to every door and see people and they're there every time there's a lot of folks so i think that's great i think that we need to think about the where words are divided and that's just one example of things i think would be great for you to push forward and  you thank you i really admire the way deep class has advocated for the native american community not just here in minnesota but nationally and in areas where to continuously do that over the years is a great service to our nation not just locally but nationally and me how much i enjoy your what remains of cereal hopefully we can get some action done and i think we're going to do that so i'm very excited about about your enthusiasm with with regard to pedestrian safety and third to mr glass minimize disruption to local neighborhoods well last last year after the winter we had our streets were they were in incredibly bad condition we had to reorganize our our city budget actually to make room for what we called the terrible twenty which is this roads that were absolutely impassable and that's something where my strong relationships with council members helped change our city budget to prioritize funding and on rebuilding our crumbling street and and of course  you know that's it's either pothole season or repairs season and now that we're in full repairs season and there's projects all over the place including right outside my front door you know there's it's disruptive and  and we're doing it for doing the best that we can to make sure that people are informed of the of these repairs and changes that are happening i think that we made some some important shifts in the last in our last budget year and moved some of our tiriel streets to the top of the list and moved  residential streets down a little bit because it was clear that our streets were taking more of a beating and we thought they were going to or that i think than the public works had planned for so where i guess i would say that our the city council  office has prioritized street repairs i don't really remember the and part of your project the question was about informing people minimize disruption to the local neighborhood yeah well and and just as an example today we were meeting with the euro and the morale is for a project that we're going to be doing at bedford and payne ave anyone who's been to a traffic and construct a traffic problem at that intersection or a traffic awesomeness if you're jimmy mirali but we talk to them very much about how we're going to continue to make sure that their businesses were open and thriving during the construction process we had in front of us and made sure that they have a liaison so that there can communicate clearly when was the best time to move forward with different aspects of the mr sullivan so there's some long term and short term solutions to these problems the long term solution is is to buy or cure and design more reliable road systems that's that's a long term solution i mean you've got to spend a lot more money upfront but in the long run you over turn your investment in the short term  can continue to do it what the city just came up with this year and it's redesign of how it maintains the roads there's there's been some improvements with the moon overlay process capitalize on that but also we need to hedge out on the materials early on and get other cities involved and assess what our needs are ahead of time so we can we can plan ahead as much as we can to buy in all the materials we need to repair the roads of the city's already trying to do this it's a very difficult job but i think it be a lot easier if we cooperate with the surrounding cities to buy materials to take advantage of economies of scale with regard to our our collective purchasing power and that w services go through to make sure that we know when people are going to be coming or going where they're much more most of the customers are coming in from and redirecting them on alternate routes  less roads we have the worst roads that we've had in the past twenty years just drive home you'll agree there hasn't been any real planning regarding a plan for fixing the infrastructure in st paul no one's talked about it the mayor does the only thing that we've ever heard about is this is the the what was called  twenty something we were doing a band aid to fix some of the roads in st paul because of such a horrendous winter well you know minnesota has are in this winters we haven't done very good planning in terms of providing for the you start asking me about how taxes are spent in the sea in street cleaner in a north then in yours you know on the street he hasn't seen preventative maintenance done on the streets in years but he works for public works and he does clean the streets and he's doing it over and more affluent areas of the city of st paul that's just not right our tax dollars should spend equally across the board public in a story that the st paul pione press wrote about maybe two months ago with regards to the new public works director cathy landry an aide that she hired one of the comments in there in quotes where that this is the public works has the lowest morale that they've had in years partly due to the cutbacks in the services that they're providing are not providing any more they're not doing preventative maintenance on the streets or not doing the street cleaning on the streets and we have a continued deterioration in our infrastructure a new council and the mayor and a new mayor need to spend a lot of time in determining how we fix and put together new roads infrastructure for the city of st paul brenda yeah i guess i would like to say something just f why i i am really excited about the mayor's very tactical and bold choice to hire former council president kathy lantry as a director of public works that woman is a dynamo firecracker great thinker and an excellent leader for a an organization that's basically a large group of engineers i would say that we are in for a wonderful future in our public works infrastructure and i'm speaking of planning think that the morale that mr glass is referring to is old news the staff is excited to work under kathy's leadership and the way that she's been able to communicate complex plans and funding difficulties and ideas for improvement is wonderful and i think we're in very good hands and i'm excited to work with  la just have to respond to this you know the mayor hired a person who didn't meet any of the qualifications of the job requirements for a major department in the city of st paul one of the things that or the job required was an engineer's degree kathy lantry met none of those in fact they spent already summers around thirteen thousand dollars with headhunters and doing interviews and they were flying in a public works director a female from some suburb of chicago for interview when the mayor decided that kathy when she was the person for the job and go figure how does she then hire anybody else in her department involved to different expectations and she was held to it wouldn't happen in the private sector the same way that it happened here thank you it and that will have to be the last question but i will read the rest of them at the end and so now we will return we will turn to the closing statements and the as well thank you so much again everyone for being here tonight there's about five times more people here than there was the first time i ran so this is an incredible group the questions have been challenging interesting  it's it's fun to hear from my challengers i want to say again that i am really i think i've i've met with you i've i've listened to you i've really enjoyed having the opportunity to celebrate you and collaborate with you and help problem solve it is truly truly an honor to serve in city council and especially with this incredible diverse and wonderful ward i am so proud of what we've done and i'm proud of what we're doing and i'm a proud of what we're going to be doing i was looking around people and i and i'm so excited to continue working with you to engage communities of color your enthusiasm for this are just heartwarming to me and i really want to dig in and work harder with you and i look back on our police force and you've been a wonderful friend and advocate i loved our ride along together taught me so much about the perspective from the police and i want to continue to learn and grow with you i look over and i rich and i know how much you care about bikeability and livability and walkability and making the north and the rest of our neighborhood wonderful and i want to continue to work with you i see todd i know that we're going to sit down and talk about potential  projects in our community including a large crozier and how do we how do we thread the needle with the needs of our unions i'm excited about that i this community i've met is wonderful like i said every day is a challenge and every day is an adventure and and i have delivered on my promises but i'm not done yet i'm seeking a second term i want to build on the momentum that we have made and i don't want to stop until every neighborhood is livable every neighborhood is vibrant and every neighborhood is steve please vote voters and districts expanding council for holding this candidates form this evening toward five in this candidates at the end of the day we all need to decide who we're going to vote for to represent ward five in the city of st paul this job requires someone who is good at relationship building with multiple constituencies requires building good relations with constituents elected officials at all levels business interest both small and large in a myriad of others i have those skills i'm a bridge builder collaborator and bring certain business expertise to the table taking a risk of getting into the restaurant business and being successful at it for almost twenty years didn't happen by accident the city of st paul with all of its projects and challenges i facing in the future and in addressing its infrastructure needs someone who is going to push for sound business planning i will be that person the renaissance of right street will happen because someone we come to cheerleader and bring all the resources together with business owners and residents to dialogue and make that happen i will be that person our youth and families need an advocate addressing recreation centers open space safe schools where we really address the chief gap and provide for all i w that person an advocate ask those who know me come call some of the nonprofits i've spoke of ask the minneapolis and university of minnesota please i want a five thousand person rally last november at d c is to see if stadium incident free that was their stated goal and we did it it was the largest rally in sports history ask any and all of them and they'll tell you i get things done my wife pam and i worked through some difficult down economic times and came out of the other side ok through it all we always kept its focus on our commitment to community and being able to provide those who needed a second or third chance at a job when other business said no thank you a lot me to live my values and give back i wouldn't be here tonight if others had provided me with those same  opportunities last year i'll say please vote for me as your first choice on november third thank you thank you mr sullivan night nightingale thank you to the district six planning council in the league of women voters for hosting tonight when i look around this room tonight i see all the all the people all the things we've built in our community over the years i've listened to the stories of my my grandfather telling me what life was like in st paul one hundred years ago and how far we've come you know i imagine south robber trail just paying out dirt road speed home and zipping around the high bridge doing a loop de loops and how far we've come today looking in this room today and all the people that are in it we've built a great civilization we can do great things when we work together really well when we when we plan ahead when we design these things ahead of time and i'm an engineer and i like i like to dream but i can turn dreams into reality when i need people's help and we need dollar work together to build our future and i think it looks pretty bright regardless our democracy is very strong and it's great to see all of you out here participating in that democracy that i and my classmate fought so very hard for it means a lot it means a lot to know that our liberties are secure because you're participating in this democratic process and i hope you'll see that my qualifications will help me help you build an even better civilization thank you thank you candidates