Santa Cruz is facing serious challenges: social service, recreation, and even public safety programs are at great risk from the ongoing fiscal crisis at the federal, state, and local levels. A conservative national resurgence, along with some questionable Council funding priorities and an often-excruciating public process, has emboldened local conservatives to try to rescind the City utility tax. Santa Cruz also faces the most serious affordable housing crisis in its history, and traffic has become impossible.

Santa Cruz needs a strong City Council with experienced leadership--a Council prepared to find needed revenues while simultaneously preserving our unique local environment. We need to restore confidence in our downtown and in the public process without abandoning our strong commitment to social justice. We need to involve the community in forging new programs that actually solve problems rather than just endlessly debating them.

I have been a Santa Cruz community activist on a wide variety of environmental, neighborhood, and social issues since 1969. I have served 18 years on the City Council and three terms as Mayor.

I believe that my vision, experience, and commitment will be important to the Council during the next four years.

I would appreciate your vote.

Mike Rotkin

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And here are a few of my too long answers to the "Progressive Coaltion  Questionnaire" that indicate my more complete views on a few major election issues:

Are there publicly held or publicly subsidized properties that you would consider opportunity sites for safe sleeping zones?  If yes, please identify them.  If no, please explain.

No. I strongly believe that if Santa Cruz becomes the only community in the United States to support "safe sleeping zones, " we will draw more homeless people to our community and overtax our social service and homeless service network. As an alternative, I support expanded public shelters (especially in the summer when we do not have adequate shelter space even for those who want it) and expansion of services that will help people get out of their homeless condition. I do not, in principle, oppose organized outdoor shelter programs, but I doubt that we could find a place in our small community where the political will could be developed to support it. We would be much wiser to spend our energy on a serious struggle to get resources for more indoor shelters (of a variety of types), job training, and other programs that would actually do something about the problem of homelessness than to go on with an endless fight about programs that we know will not be acceptable to our community and that will only lead to endless, heated, and ultimately fruitless public debate.

Do you support the downtown ordinances passed in July 2002? 

The situation downtown has deteriorated seriously over the past couple of years. Pacific Avenue has become less inviting than it was. I am not talking about people's appearance, but the aggressive panhandling, cursing and harassing women and seniors, open drug deals, crowds of rude people blocking the sidewalk who will not move aside unless forced to, bicycle riders on the sidewalk, etc. Until very recently at least, it was not a question of actual violence, but rude and threatening behavior likely to drive away the tourists and local residents who generate the sales tax that supports City services and make Pacific Avenue an attractive gathering place for our community. The police and Downtown Hosts have gotten a tacit message that the City Council majority did not want existing ordinances enforced.

In the early 1990s, the City Council passed a set of ordinances and worked out informal guidelines for street performers that addressed most of the serious problems downtown. Working closely with the police, the local merchants, and street performers, the Council was able to encourage enforcement that generally avoided harassment of street performers and allowed respectful panhandling and non-threatening gatherings of small groups. But this required constant intervention on the part of Mayors and Councilmembers.

Once this system of informal and legal enforcement fell apart, things began to get out of hand. The Council faced pressure from not only merchants (whose concerns were magnified by an economic downturn), but also local residents, to do something about the problem. The Council was faced with an unhappy choice: appear to do nothing and ignore the problem or send some kind of message that things had to turn around. They decided to pass new ordinances to "send a message." I'm glad I wasn't faced with that choice. I'd like to think that as a Councilmember, I would have worked harder earlier on to avoid having to make such a choice. I think ordinances should be passed in order to be enforced, not simply to send a message and I'm not sure that the new ordinances actually address the real problems downtown. But I don't want my answer to mislead anyone into thinking that I think things were or are just fine downtown. I do not. I would have pushed to resolve the problems in a different way. It would have involved stricter enforcement of existing laws, working with the court system to make sure that people violating the law face real consequences, working with the merchants to get them to take more responsibility for collectively confronting the problems while things can be done about them and not just complaining about them in the abstract at a later time, and sending a clear message to the police that the City Council will support them when they do their jobs and enforce the law.

Please explain your views of the economic relation between large corporate retailers and/or small independently owned and operated businesses as part of the City's tax base revenue.

In general, I believe we should put our energy into supporting small, independently owned and operated businesses over large corporate retailers. I think that our current mix of these two types of businesses is about right. Large corporate retailers like Costco bring in massive amounts of sales tax to the City which formerly leaked out to other communities when our local residents drove to Sand City and Freemont to shop there. But we have to be careful because certain large corporate businesses such as Walmart do, in fact, replace local businesses, depress the wage scale, and move local capital out of the local community at such a rate that the sales tax they generate may not even balance what is lost from the local businesses they replace. However, the City Council has to carefully evaluate each proposal for development on its merits and not get caught up in decision-making based on simplistic abstractions. Judging by environmental factors and resident convenience (less commuting), and as measured by the large local working class patronage at Costco, and the relative lack of local business replacement, it would appear that the Costco decision was a good one. I doubt that our community could absorb a Walmart or Home Depot, however, without a result of more negative than positive impacts. I think it is fair to say that my view is that we should approach any future proposals for large outside corporate businesses with great skepticism and focus on creating the kind of positive business climate that will support the development and sustainability of smaller, locally owned and controlled businesses.

What do you propose to increase the affordable housing stock?

We need to change the zoning downtown (especially along Front Street and River Street) to encourage more affordable housing, and mixed commercial/residential projects. We need to develop funding mechanisms for deeper subsidies of affordable housing projects on the scale of Neary Lagoon Cooperative and the Sycamore Project.

Do you support changing limits on density in residential neighborhoods?  If so, what changes do you propose?

No. Except on a case-by-case basis where it can be demonstrated that more density will not destroy the character of the neighborhood. The appropriate place for greater density in the City is primarily downtown, near urban transportation routes, in the Beach Flats, and on the UCSC campus.

If elected, how would you help management and labor in their contract negotiations?

As in the past, I would meet with the labor unions representing the employees and try to fully understand their issues and concerns. I would do my best to represent those concerns in helping management develop the City's bargaining proposals. I am the Coordinator of UC-AFT 2199 representing lecturers and librarians at UCSC, a Vice-President of the statewide UC-AFT, a member of the bargaining team, and a former Chief negotiator for the UC-AFT. I am a former representative to and Executive Officer of the Santa Cruz County Central Labor Council. As a labor activist, I believe that I will bring the kind of values to the City Council that will maximize the interest of City workers in the bargaining process within the real limitations faced by the City in its current economic crisis.

Yes/No.  Do you support the Living Wage Ordinance to require the inclusion of city contractors in the non-profit sector?

Yes, but obviously this can only be implemented within City budget constraints since the funding for implementation comes primarily from the City budget and not from the organizations themselves. But moving ahead on this is a high priority for me.

What is your position on utilizing temporary workers for City jobs on an ongoing basis?

I oppose it. I played a major role in the conversion of hundreds of temporary positions to permanent ones in my past City Council service. As a 29-year "temporary" worker at UCSC, I understand the basic injustice in using temporary labor to fill permanent needs.

What will you do to increase diversity in City government and staff?

It is the City Council's responsibility to put pressure on the City Manager and the Department Heads to support affirmative action in hiring. During my tenure on the City Council, the City moved from 22% female employees to over 50% and from 1% employment of people of color to over 5%. This latter statistic indicates the need for significant further work on affirmative action at the City of Santa Cruz. We also need to work on greater diversity in technical positions and management positions where the percentages of underrepresented groups are much lower than in the overall City workforce. We also need to make sure that all City workers receive the training necessary to make the City a workplace that is inviting to diverse employees.