• Why are you running?

    I believe that I have the experience that is needed for the mayoral job. Looking at the other candidates, I know my past history and I have both public and private sector experience; I had my own fishing boat, I worked for the fire department for 20 years, I have worked for the state and then now own my own business. So I think that gives me a different perspective than the other candidates. Also, I’m very involved in the community, been involved in several boards around town. Looking at my time, because I’m a business owner and can flex my time, and just coming off a year of being on the Assembly and Rotary president, I realized I had the time, I have the energy and I certainly have the passion to be a mayor.

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  • Child care

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

    That’s a tough question and unfortunately we had to resign to run for mayor, because I would have put it to a ballot to have an advisory vote on that, because I think the main issue is: should the city pick up child [care] as a core function of its government? And that’s an interesting question and it’s something the public needs to weigh in on because we have to figure out where the money is coming from, if that’s the idea. So with that being said, Best Starts is the common child care idea out there right now. I do have some concerns and I think the schools could be more involved in child care. It would be nice to get a task force together and bring in a few smarter people than I am and look at it from different perspectives and come up with a better solution.

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  • Public safety

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

    Public safety is a broad scope of topics. So starting with the opioid crisis, we are making progress with that. There are several agencies in town working on the issue and one of the problems was there wasn’t enough providers in town doing medically-assisted training and now there are several providers in town doing that. We gave $2.5 million to Rainforest Recovery Center to expand its detox, and then other areas that we’ve improved on as a city is we funded more positions for the fire, excuse me I mean police department which includes two civilian investigators. And also in the fire department, I advocated to hire six 24/7 rather than four hour, just to help them in their short-handedness and all their call volume that has just gone up and up. There’s lots of things going on, I know it’s still prevalent in the community and the community is still concerned but it’s something that’s being worked on.

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  • Affordable housing

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

    There’s a couple things going on in the works. We did fund some of the affordable housing funds to try to help people with loans. Petersen Hill, if you drive out in the Valley, you can see that it’s already started with Phase 1 and hopefully that will be successful and we can move into Phase 2 and Phase 3. And there’s several private developers in town that have had projects. And we’re still waiting to see what Eagle Rock venture is going to do downtown, and that was for workforce housing.

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