thank you everybody for being here tonight my name is alex peterson i'm writing to bring accountability to city hall i want to tell you a story about somebody i met today her name's elaine and she lives on brooklyn avenue and she just wants the city council member who's going to listen and who's going to be transparent about what's going on at city hall where are the budget dollars go away what policies are coming and to get better results she's worried about homelessness she's worried about the people who are suffering from homelessness people who are camping in the event of a car park busy and she wants to see better results from the city government i'm the candidate with experience directly related to these priorities homelessness i worked at the department of housing and urban development during the clinton administration literally in the office granting money to cities to d broke so i hope that i get your support too tonight thank you hi my name is ethan hunter and a few days ago my sister told me a story about someone she was writing on the bus with who was a homeless individual and they'd been talking and he told her that for the last few weeks and he'd been trying to break the law he'd get health care in prison because he was to get it in our city and i thought this is everything that's wrong with and this is why i'm running and we have an obligation as a city to be compared to everyone regardless of whether or not they have a home and it's up to provide the resources to help these individuals get the care they need i believe that in seattle no one should go to sleep without a roof over their head that means over a period of years i want to invest more money into public housing and requiring developers to set aside units for affordable housing for low and low middle income families and the homeless we have an obligation as a city to protect our environment for future generations that means getting single occupancy vehicles off the road expanding our public transportation and expanding our network of bike lanes were necessary and needed i'm running for city council to bring a fresh voice new moral leadership to the council and to be a voice for all of you and i really appreciate you coming out tonight thank you nick my name is beth mount seir i've been a resident of for a fan of for twenty years and in fact feels very familiar to be back in roosevelt high school i have a daughter of one all the way through the local schools up here spent a lot of time volunteering in both roosevelt and bryant i'm running because i felt like what the seattle city council is going to need in this next round is someone with experience i've got twenty eight years of local government experience having worked on the executive side starting out working on affordable housing but also improving the design quality of what was being built in unincorporated county and then i moved to the council side where i was also focused on affordable housing land use issues and i come from a background of having a master's degree in architecture from you and having worked on urban design and architecture projects for about ten years at this point i work in redmond and i i'm diving into the weeds on transportation planning a lot of work with sound transit and metro i think the focus of what we need to be doing throughout seattle but up here is the same kind of smart climate change type things focusing on  a good transportation for our areas but also the obviously the need for housing the homeless crisis that's in our community needs to be addressed i think some of this in terms of bringing new housing and more housing door community can be dealt with dealing with design quality and i believe there should be a woman elected from  i'm kathy totally and i also believe it's time to elect a woman from district four i've been listening to the community and going to your doors knocking on your doors and what i want to be is accountable also but i want to be accountable to you one of the st things that i want to do is make sure when i'm elected to have an indistinct office and in district office and a staff member who can listen to your issues district for i have a background working for the city i work for the city for a number of years as a planner and project manager for the seattle parks department i put in forty million dollars worth of  park and community center infrastructure during that time i've also worked as a nonprofit executive director i have a lot of very applicable skills for being the person to represent you in the city i've lived here for thirty five years it's a city i love it's a city you love to and let's keep it as a city that we can love by talking together meeting together and listening to each other and i'll tell you later about my endorsements but there are some good ones thank you very much for coming tonight to listen to us hi everyone my name is frank krueger i must small business owner an engineer and a renter down in wallingford this is my st time running for office it's always a complicated place on the one hand we have a lot of wealth on the hand we have here we've six thousand people sleeping on the streets tonight running because i think the city has a duty to those people i want to make sure that we have more open shelters anyone who seeks a bed at night should be able to go to those right now we have a lot of people sleeping in their cars because they prefer that to shelters i want to make sure that we have better hygiene in those shelters with enhanced shelters and i want more hygiene facilities throughout the city itself right now we only have seven hundred and twenty four hour twenty four hour restrooms throughout the city i want to make sure that we have more transitional housing i really love tiny homes i think that they are a great alternative to encampments i myself would definitely prefer living in a tiny house over a tent and i believe other people have to but most importantly i want to dramatically increase the number of social workers that we have people need personalized care and attention to treat mental illness drug addiction and honestly just to find jobs out there i want to take a people  st approach to my policy and i hope that you'll see that reflected in the rest of my answers tonight if you'd like more elaboration or any questions from me i'll be in the back at the end of all of this is very much high neighbors my name is anderson so i was eight years old when i learned that poor people are terrible it was all things to a couple of classmates i overheard saying that people who lived in jail or years were trash and i was hurt and confused because it didn't make any sense to me i lived in a trailer with my family but my mom is a nurse and dad a construction worker and we worked hard for everything we had around the same time i also realized i laid girls not just because they were smart and funny but i also found them attractive and it didn't take me too long to realize that people didn't like gay people as much as they didn't like poor folks and so i meant rd grade getting to understand all of this and  started to understand that people also don't like people of color immigrants and that was just the tip of the iceberg and then i realized the other folks out there who were different like i was had most certainly overheard similar conversations and i became an i made a vow that i would always work hard to fight for people who were being left out and mistreated simply for who they were and that's what i've done i became the st member of my family to graduate from college working my way through school to supplement grants and loans to this day i continue to work two and sometimes three jobs because i dedicated myself to public service working with the peace corps chair and currently big brothers big sisters that's what being on council means to me working hard for all of us and i hope to earn your vote thank you so much hi my name is joshua newman i live here in havana with my wife and our children i've been a lifeguard a preschool teacher and for the last thirty years a union engineer at boeing i've coached my kids baseball teams side served on the board of my synagogue and i've also been the past uncertainty and fear a lot of people feel a lot of change is coming to seattle and if we want to manage it well we need leaders who can turn that in certainty into opportunity you know that we can do this together  we're going to be brave we can maintain and be true to our liberal values while living some parts of it specifically we need to make sure that people can get around without cars most of the time we need to build more homes of more shapes and more sizes so people can find something that fits their needs and our most vulnerable neighbors don't end up on the streets and finally we need to build enough a nubile energy in the next ten years to completely evening everybody i'm sean scott formerly editor of real change news i think that he does the choice that's before us and this election cycle not just for the district for race but also citywide and  seven council elections that we have up for grabs is whether or not we want to move in the direction of being a compassionate city or one that the next cruelty in our treatment to those of us who are most vulnerable in the city i think a compassionate city is one that has a fair and even tax code where are vulnerable homeowners and struggling renters and students are not treated as a t m s by repeated property tax levies because we don't have the political courage to tax those who have the most resources among us i think a compassionate city is one that has ample social services supportive housing community service officers to support our house neighbors we've been endorsed in this race by kerry moon two thousand and seventeen general election opponent in part because of our commitment to making sure seattle moves in the direction of becoming a more compassionate city i think there are certain forces in this city that would like to see is be a more cool city that would like us to criminalize being poor that would like us to criminalize folks who have really no option but to sleep outside and so we have to do our part and district four to show the city and ultimately to show the world that that's not the kind of city that seattle is that when we go in the direction of compassionate policies it turns out that not only do those make us feel better as a community but they also work a whole lot better than some of the cooler solutions that i think folks will advance so i look forward to a great discussion with the rest of the candidates tonight so our city right now is in a time of crisis we're in a climate crisis we're in an affordability of both housing and child care crisis and you know we're in a homelessness crisis and we need leaders who are going to step up and use data and facts in order to inform the policies that we need in this city not leaders who are going to use this seat to try to further their political agenda i'm a scientist and that is what i do so when my ph d advisor told me that it was going to be hard to do the project setting parkinson's disease i did because the tools didn't exist i made the tools and when you know we had a professor at the university who was continuously harassing young women and they told me it was going to be hard to fight them you know i built a collaboration and i got people together in order to have that professor removed from taking action against young graduate students and young women so the type of collaborative leadership that is evidence based and  type of leadership i'll bring to the council and that's why i've been endorsed by and ok labor unions and workers everyone from construction workers to nurses council member teresa must gaita and other so thank you and i look around and think this is a beautiful well resourced city people are moving here from all over the world and i have to believe we can do a better job than yes i think we need a leader at city council that can take action we need to take action on the homelessness crisis that is compassionate and gets more people into supportive housing we need to take action on affordability by implementing thoughtful density that balances the needs of neighborhoods and newcomers we need to take action on carbon emissions by making it easy and affordable to access public transportation and we need to take action on closing the achievement gap and supporting our students and schools i started my career as an environmental science teacher in chicago when i moved here my teaching certificate didn't transfer and i fell into business i've been a small business leader for a dozen years specializing in organizational change and i'm a single mom and i'm running because i think city council needs to think about and pay attention to the needs of families of small business owners and of regular seattleites just trying to make their mortgage every month so i'm running to get things done and even if you don't want to vote for me on august th i would encourage you to vote for a woman on august th there are five small local businesses are facing many challenges that if a company is recent growth including raising rents development pressures construction impacts and competition from march chains what will you do to prevent commercial displacement from law for small local businesses i immediately had over thirty employees and a budget of over two million dollars and i've consistently been a small business leader this entire time and i have seen in my current business in fremont how we are stretched thin just like many households are stretched thin by rising rents trying to pay our employees a living wage and all how hard it is to survive in this city i think the st thing we need to do to support small businesses is elect a leader at city hall that is business friendly and will listen and pay attention to this community and think about how we can protect them from displacement and keep this a vibrant city with many small and medium sized businesses so again my name is emily myers you know when we talk about this when you talk about businesses in general in this city we have to be very conscious of that you know we're not just grouping and big businesses with small businesses because a lot of the small businesses they don't have lobbyists that go to the city council that go to to speak for them so it's really up to us as council members to go into those communities and talk to them about what their needs are so what i've heard from small business is where they're scared of being displaced because of development and i get that that is a scary thing you know we can't have someone you know it's hard to have about a business that's going to be moved or closed down for a year if your building is redeveloped so we need to be looking at things like st right of refusal meaning if a business is displaced than it has the st chance to come back and we need to be looking at the ways that developers are building the size of lats so that we can have smaller a lot so that more smaller businesses can be in those lots and not just wait for a large big box stores to be coming and so that they can  mortgage i would like to see the city implement commercial rent control currently we do not have the latitude to enact residential rent control that's something that we would have to ask olympia for permission for commercial rent control is a different story  i think that small business plays a very important role in the vitality and the lifeblood of a lot of our communities and i see it every day in one of the things that we can also do to stimulate small businesses have cities and have a city have a district that in the district i think we would also like to see that have in the university district pedestrian eyes following the recommendations of the university of washington mobility group and that's a real statement about something that we would be able to do as far as getting people out of their cars on the avenue  patronizing some of the small businesses that we have here in the district just you know we love our small businesses and often we talk that business is one big monolithic group and we need to recognize just as emily said that there's a big difference between international corporations that in many ways we're fortunate to have in the we need to one of the main ideas that i would like to see and that i'll be pushing for is a change in seattle seattle does have the right to charter that and a bank in seattle public bank can provide low cost loans both to commercial businesses as well as residents as well we need to make sure that when buildings are built that the that the commercial spaces inside are small enough that small businesses can afford that kind of rent and finally we need to improve the walkability of the density density of all of our neighborhoods retail depends on walking tra anderson so i have a question for you all how many of you all on a vacuum cleaner raise your hand all right how many of you all have ever been up to shambles at the street and fifteen awesome so i bring them are vacuum shop is worried about parking they're afraid that they're going to go out of business and they're already experiencing less sales because people can't access it we need to address this i'd like to see as work with a massage parlor next door so they can access parking there to make it easier for folks to drop off their vacuum cleaners to keep the small business going shambles is facing something because they are an unfinished masonry building which is threatening to be demolished by the city right now we need to talk with them to help them address this i wish i could go on but i'm at sixty seconds thank you so much hi frank krueger i've been running my business for fifteen years now and i have st hand experience with displacement i used to rent an office on the abbott self on the university in th that was the best office you could have in this town but the rent went from five hundred two hundred dollars to one thousand four hundred dollars and that's when i had to call it quits and move my business to three of our of all places but it's not just commercial businesses that run into this problem we've seen a lot of social programs in the youth district and around the city have to close their doors because they could no longer afford the rent either to combat this i want to take advantage of the upswing that we're doing and require retail space around level retail space to increase the amount of commercial space that we have throughout the city as it's been mentioned that increases the walkability of our cities and it's good for the environment and makes the city more livable to that end i want to make sure that when we're making decisions about roads we take into account businesses and have loading zones and i also agree with scott that we need rent control thank you cathy tuttle so one of the most important things we can do to have really good climate control in our area is dense walkable neighborhoods and that's true that we need to walk to our businesses but our business owners also need to be able to be in walking distance or busing distance or biking distance of their businesses so if monster is in my neighborhood and wallingford it s owner who has a young daughter has to live in mont lake terrace and commute to soft months because she can't afford to live in the neighborhood nor can any of her employees it's a really difficult situation that we really need to resolve we need to have dense housing that we're workforce housing that people can afford to live in so that our business is our business owners and the people that patronize those businesses create requiring new developments to have smaller retail spaces not necessarily smaller watts still means you can have your drugstore but it only gets a certain amount of space along the street front and then is expanded in the back but i think the other the big thing that i also wanted to mention was it's really an attitude from the city council in terms of thinking about the ripple effect of the kind of policies they pass and the impact that that has on small business owners i believe we are in a transition period where there are you know we're moving towards much more walkable areas but there's probably going to still be a demand for single occupancy vehicles and people running errands there are ways for us to quo or require shared i was talking to a gentleman in wallingford while i was canvassing the other week and what he told me he's a small business owner and he told me is that he felt that his business was being unfairly taxed he has no problem with being taxed but he says it's ridiculous that a small business like his is being taxed more than amazon and i absolutely agree with him and i think it's time that seattle looks at our tax code in terms of what we tax businesses and take a hard look at how is this affecting our city and our small businesses i think it's ridiculous that small businesses in seattle throughout our district are paying more in taxes than the largest corporation in the world i agree with john i would like to see the turn into a pedestrian only walkway with the with the amount of small immigrant businesses along the i think it's really important that we get more and more foot traffic on their support of the small businesses along we have throughout our district and city alex peterson thanks for the question so the city government has a department of economic development and it's really important that we make better use of that department and we just the mayor just appointed a new director who came from portland who is very knowledgeable about how to retain businesses because right now the seattle department of transportation just tears up the road and there's there's no medication for the businesses the owner of hardwick's hardware  endorsed me because i understand that those property taxes that are raised are passed straight through to businesses on their triple net leases and they can just raise the prices of their goods and services so so harnessing the power of our department of economic development supporting neighborhood chambers of commerce that the businesses need to organize there's a new north seattle chamber of commerce that just started up we need to support organizations like that and also the av we need to sort of started what we need to be doing is ensuring that the st mile of everyone's trip get into labor and then the last mile we have connected buses ride share is being able to set up secure people to get to those areas i also want to see in one of my proposals is that we provide free or low and middle income individuals in our city and to every student at seattle public schools transportation in the neighborhood density is one of the key points in my campaign and i think that it's really  it's great that we have these new labor rail stations coming to our district and city but we need to be make sure that we are near these major transportation hubs to ensure that when people are moved into our city that they're doing so to near public transportation being incentivized to use th public transportation getting their cars off the road and then again as i mentioned earlier in my opening statement getting people into public transportation bikes or walking to their destination will reduce carbon emissions in our city as we get more and more single occupancy vehicles off the road well i think one of the things that's actually already underway is metro is working with us stott and starting to do the planning and in fact they're scheduled to come out and start talking to the neighborhoods in this area where the new light rail stations will be opening in two thousand and twenty one so as touched on it's key to make sure that we have the right kind of connections to get to light rail but that's not just fix bus route s it's also sidewalks it's bike lanes it's other alternative pieces of transportation and getting that right mix of potentially the sharable bikes and scooters and those sorts of things but with the right kind of regulations so that all of us feel safe as we're trying to get to the light rail it also means though planning ahead or not everyone is getting to light rail and thinking about the long term connections between other areas some point center that's not everyone heading towards downtown it's people heading over towards bellevue in the east side and shops there so all that planning needs to happen kathy total this is an area that i have some expertise in i ran an organization called seattle neighborhood greenways for a number of years and one of the that we worked on was safe routes to transit it's difficult that last mile and the best way of course to get to transit is through other transit taking a bus there or walking there people already have the experience in this neighborhood of the difficulty of getting to the university station it's a long long walk and the buses don't serve it very well either we really need to get this right we need to make sure that the bus connections are good that we have shuttle buses if necessary that we're not stripping out bus and bus service in order to serve the light rail that's what we've done already we're taking away some bus service we need to put that bus service back we need to have enough parking for bikes and we need to have very safe pedestrian connections to those those new light rail stations they're not going to work unless we do kathy tuttle hi frank kruger in district four we're very lucky to have these three light rail stations but i always joke that we have three of them but i live a mile and a half from all of them and i've heard that same thing repeated throughout district four we need to definitely work on the buses specifically we need to work on the east west directions of these buses and the future i hope that we'll have a light rail station in ballard but right now getting from district four over to ballard as we all know it's quite a pain everyone voted on move  seattle we were promised an improvement to our infrastructure more buses more bike lanes we deserve that we voted for it we want it we come up with excuses for this reason or about reason why we don't complete it but to tell you right here that that will be my priority and not half measures either not the zigzagging that we do through downtown because we've made compromises here and there but safe bike lanes you should be able to get from roosevelt to downtown without risking your life thank i'm of the firm belief that if we make it as easy as possible to get from point a to point b via public transport that people will do that what i'd like to see is a congestion tax being implemented downtown so that we can take  ethan mentioned one step further and not just have free orchid cards for students or low income folks but that public transit in seattle can be free if i know i can get from here to downtown and it's not going to cost me anything why would i choose to sit in gridlock traffic and then pay twenty dollars for parking where smart folks were on top of our finances it just makes fiscal sense i would also like to see frank mention more east to west focus st and last mile  one thing that my neighbors just live a block away is the cross walk that many of you probably took to get over here it needs to be a lit up crosswalk that's in the works we need to focus upon that so it's easier for people to get where they want to go safely newman i had the honor of being at the ceremonial groundbreaking for the north extension and i was there with mayor begin at the time as part of both my leadership in the maple leaf community council as well as seattle subway so i've been working on mass transit for a long time and we're going to expand it so in order to make sure that people have equitable access to it st off we need to have a credible bus transfers and that part of that is going to take it's going to take removing arterial street parking and enabling people and making it easier for most people to get around without a car most people not everyone i've got four kids i'm not taking them on the bus every day but when more people are out of their cars it does hell of a time b in new york my grandfather jimmy who passed away last year was actually an entrepreneur who helped pioneer what was known as the dollar van service so these were communities within queens that were sort of cut off from major transit hubs throughout the city he saw that there was a need for a last mile solution i'm not sure that that's how he would have termed it by actually devise a shuttle service so you went from neighborhood to neighborhood driving people to major transit hubs in queens i would like to see a similar solution enacted here in seattle preferably obviously with an electric vehicle with respect to where the space into our larger climate strategy so far three environmental organizations have endorsed and that's the sierra club is a sole endorsement that enjoys seattle subway an endorsement that i enjoy with joshua doman and also the trains the writers union i found out today is city is talking about piloting right now and i think that is something that we could be using especially in this area where we have very few routes i think one of the biggest things that we need to make sure that we're doing is taking data into consideration so looking at the line by data of like where people are using their bikes and build infrastructure with data driven by plane so that we know where they should be going and then constantly reevaluating lake if the bus lanes aren't working and the bike lanes come into the neighborhoods talk to folks about it make sure that you all are getting the access you need to the light rail stations and that something like as a scientist who is constantly reevaluating my work that's something that i'm going to do in city council is making sure that you know it's not just one plan that we're continuing to engage folks and re evaluate our plans it's great to go last because everybody says so many great things nd to last so i agree with so many things people have said i agree that we need to add the neighborhood bus routes back that have been cut i agree that we need to think really thoughtfully about bus to light rail connections and also pedestrian safety getting to those i personally take the light rail and i take the three hundred and seventy two and have to walk all the way across it doesn't make sense for people pushing strollers it doesn't make sense for people who are mobility impaired so we have a great opportunity with the new stations going in to do a better job i'd also like to see is raise the limits of the order to lift card which is the reduced cost or capacity it covers middle class people as well to do all these things we're going to have to elect somebody that has a good grasp of financial leadership and can make good use of our move see out a levy and put it to the projects that will impact the most people so we're really blessed to have the two light rail stations opening up but those people who try to use the husky station you know the access to that was really messed up and if you've ever tried to walk from the stadium or from other neighborhoods there it's we need to do a much better job of improving the pedestrian house ways to husky stadium what i'd like to do with the three stations here is run a series of pilot projects measure the data see what's working best to move  the most people to the light rail stations and then replicate that for the rest of the area so he could be subsidizing shuttle they could be the pedestrian pathways it could be cycling it could be elected officials often need to make tough policy decisions that are unpopular with their concert constituents because their experience knowledge and counsel from experts tells them it is the right thing to do what is one policy issue that you would support even if your constituents do not favor it neuroscientist i am very aware of how drug addiction and substance abuse is disorders work my policy manager is an opioid researcher so we're very knowledgeable about that us safe consumption sites save lives they are harm reduction strategy that helps control an infectious diseases that helps people have access to social workers and access to resources and encase there is an overdose then people have access to medical care immediately it takes the burden off of emergency services it also doesn't that the data shows us that they does not increase crime in neighborhood it does not increase you know problematic behavior it does do is it keeps  our people safe and it keeps the people who are going to be using drugs anyways safe so we have to say that the policy that i have found to be one of the more contentious ones in talking with my district for neighbors is the idea of ending the current city policy of sweeping homeless encampments i think at this stage the city has wasted ten million dollars a year going back to i think it's two thousand and thirteen or fourteen that from a fiscal accountability lens i know that that's a popular buzzword in this race it's also the case that looking back i would rather have that sixty million dollars a year i'm going back to two thousand and thirteen or fourteen spent on supportive housing spent on mental health women cars are not our future cars are an amazing technology and we designed our cities in our country in every new city in the united states for the last eighty years around using a car but they're not our future we know that from climate change we know that for congestion even if all the cars are electric you still get traffic jams you still can't get around and they're still heavy and dangerous and they still take up a lot of space that we could use as parks as offices as retail space so the policy that i will advocate for is removing arterial street parking throughout the city we know that retail and commercial places depend on foot traffic and walking traffic that's why commercial places like the u district are more expensive than ones up near north gate and out in the suburbs we cars anderson this is a tough question but it's such an important one because there are always going to be things that we disagree on and the kind of person that will sit with anyone in here any opinion for instance half of my family and extended family voted for trump but we're all still on speaking terms so that one issue that i would move forward on without the full support of district or constituents is to pairing a community police outpost with an urban rest stop a lot of the folks that i talked to in the doors are either very supportive of police and have concerns about our homeless neighbors are very supportive of our homeless neighbors and have concerns about our police here in these two together where you can have a police presence and also an area where our homeless neighbors are able to take a shower brush their teeth use the restroom and also a place where i would like to have a district office and be available to constituents brings it all together and that's what community building  is krueger controversy when i go around i think the st one that i was introduced to was the up zoning controversy everyone had opinions on m h a and how the city is changing i don't understand it so i myself had a large apartment complex built next to me i didn't used to have a beautiful view of lake union in gasworks park and it's gone now but we have to acknowledge that the city is growing just this week apple announced it is hiring two thousand new people facebook is hiring google is hiring i want to leave someone off its tablo just got bought by sales force that's going to be more jobs we need to acknowledge that the city is growing and not stick our heads in the sand i'm excited by the idea of opening our neighborhoods to people who otherwise kono afford them before by stabilizing rent prices in fact i'm inspired by a crazy idea but i love it of eliminating single families owning all together let's open up this city let's build let's open our neighborhoods to new people and make it affordable thank you kathy total the biggest reason that i got into this race is that since the early ninety's i've been working on climate action and i feel a call to actually do something about climate action i have felt since the early ninety's to do something but now we really have to we have five years to turn the whole ship of state around the city has to change radically so that it's going to be controversial we need to have density we need to have really good bus transportation we need to lower our carbon footprint in half in the next ten years maybe even more and when you start to signal your the wheel start to go and you start to think about what some of those things are that we're going to have to change those are going to be some pretty controversial things we're going to have to travel a little less and walk a little more and live a little more densely than we do actually a lot more densely and a lot more to so go with me on this journey because we don't have a choice we really do need to change how or what our footprint is beth mount seir now i think the elephant in the room in the one that's really right in our backyard is the how our communities are changing and i i think all of us a  knowledge change is hard and there's a lot of change coming to the city i have to say i am a bit more of an incrementalist than some people i don't think this has to happen overnight although i completely agree with kathy in thinking about frank's comments of the future of less impact in terms of carbon and those sorts of things that we do need more density we can do it i think in ways that preserve the quality of life in our neighborhoods and part of that is getting the design guidance right getting the incentives right to include affordable housing in that new development that's happening it's not a matter of one of the things i think some neighbors would disagree with is just the approach to how you permit projects in this case where adding process that just adds cost and doesn't add value i believe that every decision the council member makes will will come under large amounts of scrutiny and for good reason we need to have a difficult but necessary conversation regarding our environment and the future of our planet one of the things that i want to see in seattle is for us to implement congestion pricing and specifically to start with a single occupancy vehicles i've talked to people throughout the district some of them supported it a lot of them don't however but it's absolutely necessary that we make hard decisions tough decisions to get people out of their cars onto buses or to  work that need to go at the same time while we do that we need to make sure that we're expanding our network of bike lanes expanding on public transportation so that people aren't just get being taxed on their cars with no other options we need to give them the options and then still tax the vehicles that continue to go through our city alex peterson i think it's really important making decisions to listen to all sides to be transparent about his or her decision making and to explain the pros and cons of the decision not to just be a cheerleader for it so one of the things i think will be controversy though is i really believe we should be funding homely those homeless response programs proven to work so that means that some programs that produce outcomes that don't actually exit people to permanent supportive housing or need to redirect funds from those nonprofits to nonprofits that are actually doing really well and actually helping people helping people and i think that will be controversial for people who volunteer with those nonprofits serve on the boards of those profits or just know about those organizations but i think as long as they are explains him or herself and is transparent about decisions then that's the way to go so i'm a big believer the stupor that the right answer is often lies between two extremes i really do i'm a pragmatist as a business leader doing strategic change i often think about the pragmatic middle ground approach and i think one of the most controversial issues in our district is density and it's actually the one where my thinking has evolved the most in the course of that campaign as a single single family home owner with a special needs child and a dog single family neighborhoods makes sense to me but the more i learned about the impact of climate change the more i learned about how many jobs have been added in our city and how not enough houses have been added i became convinced that we needed thoughtful and balanced solution for the and so i completely support the eighty legislation that's currently in front of city council even though some of my neighbors don't because i think it is a balance and thoughtful way to add density in our single family neighborhoods without changing them over completely this is you may have gathered some or all of this got a little bit of advance warning on just a couple questions and had some time to think about those in that subset of homeless and human services funding and i know it's another one that i thought about mentioning is being a controversy and divided opinions but a special people especially people who are homeless but have managed to retain their cars are the people who are most likely to be able to move back into permanent housing they typically have jobs and so on one of the areas that i noticed in last year's budget that they still are not funding all that well is assistance to that population the other top three  priorities for me would be looking at more of this sort of incentives and things that would make more affordable housing be a component of privately developed housing which really is the engine that brings the most so more incentives like tren transfer of development rights and other sorts of things in that way and then finally on transit i would also say that some of the smartest investments that we could make and i didn't see a high priority is signaling station and making sure that we can move tuttle last week i knocked on the door of a family that lived our lives across the street from the metropolitan market in a condo two working parents there was a woman who worked as a genetic future and a man who works as an elementary school teacher in the local school and they have two young children and they paid two thousand five hundred dollars a month in child care and she was in tears when i i walked to the door because they were boxing up all of their things they were going to have to sell their condo because they can't afford to live and pay for child care in the community that they love and so yes the things that i want to work on our workforce housing  child care that's affordable and we need to keep people in their homes i mean we really do need to keep people in their homes because we can't build communities we can't build communities in the future if we don't keep people in the homes that they love that they should be able to afford and to working class salaries frank again you can't talk about the budget without st talking about revenue we are in a dire situation where our revenue is very regressive that means the lower income people are paying more than their majority has been their share i believe in the state income tax and i want to push washington to have one but that's going to take time in the short term i want to have crafted taxes on large businesses tax i am pro had tax but before that i want to have partnerships with businesses so that they can be a part of our communities and not just take advantage of it number two i want to make sure the funds go to their intended purposes what we tell people the money is going to go to a show that the red light violations should go to infrastructure and for building new schools sidewalks lastly i want to ask that every department in the city take a small cut across the entire board so that we can reallocate funds to be human services department i said that i want to dramatically increase the number of social workers and i mean it thank you my top three budget priorities would be human services education and neighborhoods i have another question for you all i raise your hand if you've heard the term affordable housing crisis are homelessness crisis a d so when i was looking at the two thousand and twenty budget that was coming out of the mayor's office the two budget line items that addressed these issues out of seven budget budgets were items five and six we know we're in a crisis with homelessness and affordable housing why are we not funding it this is a major issue that i saw and why i would devote the funds to that and the fact that every single person in this room raise their hands is why it's so important to district fo newman a top three budget priorities are addressing homelessness we need to have some quick fixes and provide people places to live we need to improve the nd we need to improve permitting can expand our city's ability to build the homes that we need and rd as i was talking about before we need bus lanes and i'll do this with actual transparency i mentioned i'm an engineer i believe in data and i believe in an analytical process and so i actually have to take issue with one of the other candidates up here who talks about transparency and talks about accountability but it isn't clear who is going to be accountable to alex's says he talks about accountability but there are work on that there is no there's limited policy information on his website you deleted your newsletter subscription  when it talks and when we're talking about being accountable to the people we know who the accountability is going to be we're in this mess because previous city council members were on the council and allowed the housing cr act to follow i think you know as somebody who used to work as a youth mentor for washed it's a middle school with the my brother's keeper initiative which was a program started by president obama in two thousand and fifteen and funded currently by the parks and recreation program i would like to see the money that we're using currently on ineffective sweeps of homeless encampments to actually be directed to youth programs and mentorship programs like my brother's keeper and my sister's keeper secondarily i would like to see the city's community service officer program expanded currently we have twelve c o so officers that were recently reinstated into the budget those are unarmed officers that are going to be responsible for going to homeless encampments to people who might be suffering mental health and directing those people to services in the district were those were chilling oils was killed i think a c s o program would have saved a life thirdly while we're talking about climate justice and as a candidate that's been endorsed by the sierra club i would like to see us dip into our debt incapacity to pay for the housing we need to pay for the trains that we need because i'd rather be paying off debts in twenty dollars or thirty years than not having a planet to live on in ten or fifteen are moral documents and so i think if we're serious about addressing climate change we need all of our policy decisions to be centered around climate justice so one of the st things we would do is streamline the office of housing so that we can build more mixed  supportive housing with mixed income housing with green spaces and proximity to transit and to have more housing options for the people of seattle i also don't like to see the budget that's being used for why there is a sion to be moved to the office of sustainability and transport and environment so that we can do weather ization programs because buildings are their nd largest carbon emitters in our city and we need programs and incentives to retrofit our buildings and create green jobs that way with apprenticeships with unions and rd is transportation to make sure that we're not using a car centric model for transportation because we know that when people spend less time in traffic they're happier and they can walk around and take transit