• Why are you running?

    I’m running because I think the Assembly needs to ask good questions, make good financial decisions. And, that’s what I’m good at.

  • Child care

    What's the city's role in child care accessibility?

    I know that’s been brought up as a problem and I’d like to look at it some more. I’m not sure (of) the causes of the problem, but I think the city may have a role in it. The recent proposal has been to help subsidize that, the cost of child care. I guess I’d like to look at that a little more and find out why those costs are so high, whether there’s restrictions on who can offer child care, (and) whether there’s problems with entry into the business.

  • Public safety

    How can the city better address public safety concerns, and how would you pay for it?

    First of all, how you pay for anything has to be looked in light of the whole CBJ budget. It isn’t just adding money here from another source. You have to take a look at the budget and say ‘OK, what is the most important things that we’re doing? And what are those priorities?’ It may mean that not everything gets funded. There are lots of ideas that why you should fund this program or that program. But I think we have to take a global approach, which is what the city does every budget cycle. And they look at what are the most important things and what can we afford to fund.

    With regard to public safety, my understanding is that we need to able to fill positions. I listen to the deputy police chief awhile back in talking about the difficulty in recruiting and hiring police officers. So, I think we need to look at what can be done to encourage people to become police officers here. We also need to work with the state relative to regards to what the penalties … the SB 91 question, what penalties are out there and what the rules are. If we need to change some of that to increase our efforts towards reducing crime in this town, we need to work with the state to do that.

  • Affordable housing

    Do you have any specific policy ideas for addressing affordable housing in Juneau?

    I don’t have any specific policy. Again, you need to look at the whether or not there’s barriers to entry, whether we’re making the requirements of housing too costly, whether we’re not providing land for private developers to develop. I don’t have any beyond general ideas of looking at whether or not it’s easy for developers to provide more housing. I think that’s the primary thing I would look at.