Ami on the Issues

Community Resiliency & Preparation: NO MASS SURVEILLANCE

I am founder of the Get the Flock Out campaign. Together, we successfully lobbied the Santa Cruz City Council to cancel its Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR) contract. I am also an investigative journalist and deeply concerned citizen and resident of the United States. We need a city council that has eyes on the federal government and corporate oligarchs who seek to institute authoritarianism in our nation. We must protect all our Constitutional rights at this crucial moment, for all residents and immigrants in our city.

We can work locally to prevent the worst of authoritarian and Tech-AI oligarch tentacles from encroaching on our community. I helped beat back mass surveillance here in the city and will continue to work to protect our community from spying tech and no-cash systems as Mayor of Santa Cruz.

We Must Build Community

As Mayor, I will use my platform to encourage building community in every neighborhood in Santa Cruz. We must start now to prepare for any emergency that comes our way, including natural disasters, like our own CZU fires, and threatening, unlawful federal incursions.

This means micro-grids, independent power stations, alternative and disaster-proof communications tools and more. Building community is a joy, and essential to our well being and capacity to help and protect one another through anything that comes our way. I was a climate activist for many years, and understand the hardships to come (some are already here!)

Rather than become afraid, we can work together to create climate resilience, to mitigate global heating as much as possible, and protect our friends and neighbors from authoritarianism, Constitutional violations and the cruelty of the current federal administration. Let’s focus locally, where we can get things done!

Dialogue, Transparency and Mutual Respect

As Mayor, I will meet with the public ahead of council meetings to review the council agenda. I will educate the general public on an ongoing basis about the issues we face and seek your input. Transparency, community dialogue and mutual respect are very important to me. As someone who has frequently lobbied the city council and now DCC, I am frustrated with the lack of two-way communication between those who hold power and constituents.

We need to level this playing field and bring new voices to the table. A political machine has been built in this town by the real estate industry and landlords. I have watched it happen over the last eight years. It is time to break up this machine. We need fresh voices and perspectives.

“All Voices Heard” is one of my campaign slogans, and this means listening to folks from every position and ideology. I am known in this community as someone who can disagree with you, but still value you, and work with you.

Ami on the Issues

Housing and Commerce

My priorities will be affordable housing first, housing stabilization, tenant protections and considering the livability of all our neighborhoods as we grapple with state mandates to build, and a very real housing crisis. The city has built its fair share of housing, PLUS. We need to push back now and make sure we are building in a way residents can feel good about.

When the tenants at the St. George Hotel were wondering where to turn to be able to stay in rent-stabilized apartments, I reached out to a local and influential housing policy advocate to urge action. He then worked with council members to keep tenants in their units.

We need more Section 8 housing and more affordable housing units in Santa Cruz. We also need more housing for young people (and older people!) to be able to buy into. I support re-zoning for increased multi-family housing, and condos—if we can get them—in our neighborhoods. At the same time, we must protect heritage trees, biodiversity and crucial ecosystems.

COMMERCE AND OUR DOWNTOWN

I absolutely support local commerce and a revitalized downtown. The city currently offers incentives to commercial property owners to activate empty store fronts. Multiple new housing developments should be supporting downtown businesses and getting those storefronts filled.

In the meantime, we need more carrots and/or sticks to fill empty storefronts.

As mayor, my focus in commerce will be on supporting local businesses like Dharma’s (although in Santa Cruz) and bringing vibrancy and life downtown. I’d like to see more carrots and sticks to get empty storefronts filled and revisit the idea of a car-free Pacific. In other cities, this has worked wonders for downtown business. …

I believe that the further away the owners and stockholders of a company are from their customers, employees, and from where they provide services and manufacture products, the worse the customer service and the less caring there is for the environment and for people overall.

Luckily, a mayor can focus on our local economy and circulation of money. We should shop local, eat local and certainly continue to attract tourists, whose dollars spent here help pay for city services.

Homelessness

We need to listen more to those who are unhoused and create solutions that work with people rather than for people, who may not want those solutions. I  have worked extensively with unhoused folks–at many levels, including incarcerated folks and youth in group homes–and with service providers.

For nearly two years, I led a volunteer class at MHCAN on Cayuga for mental health clients, the unhoused and precariously housed. All this work has given me the skills to really listen.

We need to listen and model programs on others that have worked for other cities.

One city brought homeless down dramatically by knowing every unhoused person by name, and understanding each person’s needs. With our current numbers of unhoused (if our Point in Time numbers are correct), we can do this.

When we seek to address particular needs, we begin to understand the need, for example, for community and emotional support many people find in encampments.

Let’s make space for tiny home communities like the one recently completed in Watsonville and allow for residents to have a voice in how these communities are run.

We also need to use progressive taxation (taxing where wealth exists) measures to generate funds currently threatened by federal cuts.

Environmental

I have been a climate activist for many years. We must protect heritage trees, biodiversity and crucial ecosystems. I have successfully worked for Land Back efforts in the city, and support the Rights of Nature movement, locally.

I support efforts to bring the salmon and more steelhead trout back to the headwaters of the San Lorenzo and tributaries. I care deeply about our watershed and ensuring we have enough clean water for everyone who lives and works in the city.

RAIL and TRAIL

I have supported the Rail and Trail since my last campaign. Santa Cruz County voters expressed their preference for both rail and trail when they defeated Measure D.

This is a complex issue, with many actors and large sums of money reported as both threatened and needed.

As a journalist and elected official, my job will be to sift through all the issues and bring clarity to the public.

I generally support building an awesome interim trail while keeping the tracks in place for future use and to avoid losing the tracks altogether (abandonment) and then forfeiting our rights to the thoroughfare (rail banking).

We are part of a larger, regional transportation plan that continues to move forward. I support playing our part in the plan.

For those of you who are super interested, and a little bit wonky, dig deeper into Ami’s policy positions here. We will try to add forum questionnaires as they become available to us.