Mayoral candidates debate weighty local issues
Alex Mudd - March 12th, 2008The four challengers running against current Flagstaff mayor Joe Donaldson met at Gardner Auditorium in the W.A. Franke College of Business on March 4 to debate about issues relating to NAU students.
Candidates Sara Presler-Hoefle, Stephen Knutson, Rick Krug and David Schlosser participated in the debate. Donaldson was invited but declined, citing a previous engagement.
Sara Presler-Hoefle has lived in rural Arizona and Flagstaff all of her life. At age 28, she is the youngest of the four mayoral challengers, and she views her candidacy as an important opportunity to bring NAU and the Flagstaff community closer together. Even before the debate began, Hoefle displayed a lot of energy, making her way through the crowd to introduce herself to the students and residents who had gathered in the auditorium.
Hoefle views NAU as an opportunity for Flagstaff as a whole. She outlined three major points where the Mountain Campus students and Flagstaff residents form a symbiotic relationship.
First are the dollars NAU students contribute to community businesses. Students live here, and in turn spend money on groceries, entertainment and the other essential things that any person would need in a city.
Secondly, students drive a lot of cars. Hoefle views the recent agreement to combine the NAU bus system with the Flagstaff city bus system in a Northern Arizona Intergovernmental Public Transportation Authority agreement as a step in the right direction. A major issue in the race for mayor is what many residents perceive to be severe traffic congestion.
Hoefle also sees the highly-educated faculty and student body at NAU as an untapped well of potential knowledge for community contribution.
“We have a ready work force at our university that is untapped,” Hoefle said. “There are a lot of people like myself who want to live and work here, and we really need someone with direction to help us do that. Subsidizing a sabbatical costs much less than subsidizing a San Francisco company to tell us how to do it better in Flagstaff. We have brilliant, well-educated faculty, and staff that are very good at organizational management, sustainability, forestry and education.”
NAU alumni and candidate Knutson has based his campaign on the foundation of environmental protection and sustainable consumption for Flagstaff.
Those residents who only listened in for the first hour of Tuesday’s debate on Big Mouth Talking missed out on one of Knutson’s primary points, which he illustrated with a copy of a U.S. dollar and a fictional sustainable dollar. The U.S. dollar represented a currency based on resource depletion and unsustainable environmental policy, while the sustainable dollar represents what he believes to be an environmentally friendly substitute.
“We actually have to change the very nature of our economy from being one of resource depletion, pollution and destruction of the environment to one of cooperation and sustainability,” Knutson said. “And we can do that by selling these dollars [U.S.] and getting these [sustainable].”
Knutson explained how a local friend who has water collectors on all of his property’s buildings captures enough water to be self-sustaining, and this is the type of innovation Flagstaff should be seeking.
Knutson suggests the community must become more involved with the problems. He said many of the roadblocks the Flagstaff council runs into could be worked out with the input of more concerned citizens. Knutson hopes his election to the office of mayor would spurn a greater multitude of community voices to contribute ideas to their collective problems.
Krug’s candidacy focuses on an inclusive message that approaches problems of policy from more than one angle. He hopes to make Flagstaff a more attractive place for high-paying jobs and housing developers. Krug would also like to address what he sees as an inequality in government spending in various parts of town.
Krug said leadership and communication were two of the most important reasons he is running for the mayor’s office. He blames the public’s perception of President Bush on poor communication skills, and suggests the current mayor suffers the same type of communication deficiency.
“I think in America, especially right now, we are screaming for leadership,” Krug said. “I love our president, but he is probably the worst communicator in history. It’s abysmal; he can’t communicate himself, so he looks like a poor leader.”
Krug said he did not want to be an authoritarian voice, just a clear voice to debate and implement policy.
“I think [Donaldson] is a manager in a leadership position and that is his greatest downfall,” Krug said. “You don’t want me doing detail work, you want me leading things. I am the big-picture casting, communicator person, I’d rather be doing that.”
Schlosser, a former NAU instructor, is also running on what is widely considered to be a housing crisis in Flagstaff. Schlosser believes trying to bring more big corporations like Gore to Flagstaff is a fruitless effort until you provide workers affordable housing options.
“More than half of the households in Flagstaff, roughly 25,000 households, pay more than 30 percent of their income monthly for housing,” Schlosser said. “That qualifies them essentially as destitute in economic terms. If you are spending more than a third of your income to pay for housing you are short everywhere else.”
Schlosser blamed current Flagstaff policy regarding housing developments and some well-intentioned environmental protection laws for this shortage.
Even though the city allows eight housing units per-acre in some areas, which is considered very high-density, there are still laws that will not allow developers to cut down or relocate trees on those properties.
He also highlighted the regulatory costs in starting a project. The nationwide average for the regulatory cost charged to developers before they start building a home is about $35,000; according to Schlosser, the Flagstaff average is about $75,000. He also said the nationwide average for approval time on a project is about 3-9 months, in Flagstaff it takes about 2 years.
“If you insist on rejecting growth, and ultimately that is what the city here is doing, either intentionally or unintentionally, what you are doing is turning over your ability to manage growth to the people who have the most money,” Schlosser said.
He wants NAU students to like Flagstaff and choose to stay here, but admits it is mostly a tourist town, and the service industry jobs tourism entails do not provide the types of opportunities most NAU graduates are looking for.
“For students who fall in love with Flagstaff and want to stay here I think we need to create opportunities for them to apply what they are learning in school while they are in school,” Schlosser said. “Examples of that would be internships in city departments, various teaching opportunities to work with a lot of the not-for-profit organizations around town. Then I think we have to address the issue of affordable housing because until we do that we are not going to be attracting the kind of employers to the city that will employ the kind of people NAU is graduating.”
The major campaign issues are generally not a concern to NAU students. Rather, they focus on issues that many of the struggling middle-income families in Flagstaff face on a regular basis. This debate focused primarily on issues that many NAU students would care about.
The Fat Tire Festival was one of the first issues, and the candidates had a broad range of opinions regarding whether they would try to work with organizers to bring the event back to Flagstaff.
The question was first posed to Knutson who explained with the festival came many liability problems and a lot of red-tape for everyone involved. He indicated he would be very willing to work out a way for Fat Tire to continue visiting Flagstaff because anything that is fun is a good thing to have.
Krug’s opinion of the event was not as lofty, citing the major disturbance events such as Fat Tire cause for downtown businesses. If they did want to continue having the festival there would have to be strict regulations. Krug does not feel comfortable with people drinking heavily in public and said that although many students enjoy the festival it was not a big issue for him.
According to Schlosser, Flagstaff drinks more beer than any of the other bigger cities the Fat Tire Festival visits on a yearly basis. He believes at this point tourism is Flagstaff’s primary economic input, and events like Fat Tire bring a lot of people and dollars into the city. He suggests looking at other successful and safe programs in the area that Fat Tire could be modeled after in the future.
Hoefle thinks relocating the festival outside of the city would only exasperate the problems of drunken driving and bike riding that go along with the festival. Even though social activities are important she does not think they should impede on public safety, and any future model for the event should have buses or another safe form of transportation.
Another issue discussed that many students care about are the new parking meters downtown.
Hoefle did not like the current parking meter plan. She thinks the safe ride program at NAU campus is a great thing and if expanded could provide students a safer more hassle-free substitute for transportation to downtown.
Knutson’s only comment relating to the actual question was the fact that it was a “can of worms” and was a gigantic mess as it is now. He would have rather seen the $1.3 million invested into renewable energy somehow.
Krug was very disappointed with the parking meters, saying they were the result of a two-year report that really gave Flagstaff no good information.
He says there needs to be a comprehensive solution, maybe even a parking structure downtown for people who work and live there.
Schlosser described the parking meters as the least bad solution that could be reached on the parking problem at this point. He views the parking meters as a band-aid, not a permanent solution. Schlosser explained the city did not take into account the refugee parkers who would just move further up into neighborhoods for spots, and there is no good way to dedicate the revenue earned by the parking meters directly to finding a permanent solution to that problem.
The candidates also took some time discussing the peaks issue, and what part the city council could actually play in deciding whether to use reclaimed water.
Hoefle sees it as a federal land use issue, and considering the water situation in the Southwest, said using fresh water may not be entirely appropriate. She said it probably should have been decided by the community.
Schlosser disagreed, although he said it is an important issue to the city, they can not just decide who they will sell water to; although it is not the decision he would make had he the choice.
“If you elect a pro-life mayor you can’t say I’m not selling water to the Planned Parenthood,” Schlosser said.
Krug would have voted yes if it had come to him in a council vote. He agrees with Hoefle that it is a federal land use issue. Even though the religious symbolism of the peaks is at the center of the debate there is a separation of church and state on federal land. Krug said he understands the sensitivity of the issue but in purely legal terms it does not matter.
Knutson said he would not have allowed it. He sees the Navajo and Hopi as important neighbors in Flagstaff society and these sites are sacred to them so we should respect that.
Following the first hour of the broadcast, which is available in a podcast from www.k-jack.org, there was a question and answer portion of the debate. Most of these questions were dealing with general Flagstaff issues, ranging from fire department policy to regional cooperation in northern Arizona.
William Marty, a student working on his history masters, was pleased with the issues covered. He said the peaks were probably his most important issue and he was relatively pleased with the answers given by most candidates.
“I don’t get how people can say it is okay to use reclaimed water that has obvious problems,” Marty said.
He was also glad to hear the parking situation downtown and safe-ride program discussed by the candidates.
“I think the downtown area, with the drinking and making sure everyone is safe when they are going out to party, is a huge issue,” Marty said.