Live Oak • Age: 55 • Occupation: Clinical Trial Manager, 14 Years
What are the top issues for the 1st district?
The top issues I am hearing from the public include affordable housing and homelessness, disaster preparedness and climate change / environment.
A good number of people, both young and older, want much better public transportation, very bad safety walking/biking on the streets, programs to enrich seniors and children’s needs.
What thoughts do you have on boosting affordable housing, finding real solutions for homelessness?
The increasing homelessness problem is due in part to the serious lack of affordable housing in tandem with seriously low incomes relative to the cost of living here, combined with a percentage of people who are facing mental illness and drug addiction.
Community members on fixed incomes are facing serious challenges where many seniors tell me they often must choose between food, rent, and their prescriptions for serious diseases like diabetes.
We need to focus on creating more affordability for people who work here because there is a huge gap between the average household income and the average rental rate or home price. For this reason, people are highly overextended, paying far more that the recommended 30% of their income towards rent.
At the same time, we need to work on underlying systemic issues that have been undermining people’s ability to make ends meet. We must increase affordability as we increase the number of homes we build. If we do not collectively address the underlying systemic issue we face as a country where the distribution of wealth is so extremely top-heavy, the imbalances will continue to erode the strength of the country. We must rebuild our strong working class as they are the backbone of the country.
45 years ago, when the country was strong and growing, unions were strong and corporations paid 70-85% taxes — they gave back!
Now many workers earn slave wages and corporations ‘give’ through philanthropy which allows them to control the people and organizations to which they give.
We need to look to building affordable housing and workforce housing on public lands as well as work with churches, landowners, and organizations that are willing to share their lands for affordable housing by creating public-private partnerships.
We must prioritize preventing people at risk for falling into homelessness by providing resources to those who need it. For example, if a family loses their job or has a major health issue, we can set up a process to provide bridge funds to help people at risk. I support a Housing First model in getting people into housing right away so that they can get stabilized, and if needed, can work on receiving mental and drug abuse support.
It costs us 3- to 4-times more in the long run to not house people and have them go in and out of the systems as they struggle.
And the daily traffic jams on highway 1?
If we are to address our severe climate and environmental issues as well as equity and access, we need to prioritize robust alternatives to driving cars/trucks.
We must create a robust public transit system and make it very safe for our most vulnerable, our seniors and children, to walk and bike to public transit and other destinations. I’ve heard many moms and families in the community say their kids cannot longer safely bike to school.
Safety on the streets has grown a lot worse over the past few years. As a member of the County Community Traffic Safety Coalition, in 2017 a report showed that every 3 days in our county someone is killed or seriously injured in our community! The rate of pedestrian deaths has increased even more than the rate of cycling deaths and our county is one of top three worst in the state!
I am committed to working on making our streets safer for everyone. This means calming traffic while also implementing smart protected bike lanes and crosswalks. We need to incentivize companies to provide free bus fare and incentivize people to take public transit. With the upcoming changes to our Metro service to 15-minute frequency, it will become important to encourage more people to ride the bus.
When building new developments, bus passes should be included for new residents.
By providing better busing, safer streets for biking and walking, and passenger rail, we can get more people who live and work here out of their cars and provide an option where tourists can eventually travel to Santa Cruz by train from over the hill, as we are considered a part of the State Rail Network.
Can you talk about your housing situation? Homeowner or renter? How does that help you relate to 1st District constituents?
I have been a renter, an owner, and a landlord and have rented to Section-8 tenants as well, which I highly recommend.
We own our home now, but having been a renter while also being an owner.
I’ve rented from good landlords and bad landlords. I have had good tenants and had one bad tenant. Having experienced these things gives me a sensitivity to the many issues landlords and renters face.
As a homeowner, for most of our time in Santa Cruz, we lived in a very small house that was not in the best condition because that is what we could afford. We didn’t want to over-leverage as the up and down cycles of jobs and lay-offs are pretty regular.
I am very aware it is impossible to afford a home on the average income one makes in Santa Cruz. We were fortunate to buy when we did so many years ago. Our son works locally and cannot afford to rent a place in town and so he currently lives with us.
Can you describe your family situation? Married/single? Children/pets?
Married, one son, dog, cat, chickens. If I could, I’d have a goat to milk and some rabbits, fowl and fish as well — but I don’t.
Your favorite spot in the 1st district? You spend your free time doing what?
DeLaveaga Park trails.
I used to train for triathlons and marathons (run, bike, swim) and trained with Santa Cruz Triathlon Association.
I am an avid mountain biker and coached youth mountain biking for 7 years. I am a passionate urban farmer and a classically trained opera singer, but I haven’t sung classically in years. I do perform improvisational music jams with my musician friends.
I love cooking great food. I inherited a cioppino recipe from my dad that he got from an Italian San Francisco restaurant owner decades ago and it is one of the best cioppinos ever.
How long have you lived in Santa Cruz County?
Since 1996/97. We’ve lived in Live Oak for 16 years, Happy Valley, Boulder Creek, La Selva.
What brought you here?
My husband worked in Scotts Valley before we moved to the area and he fell in love with Boulder Creek.
I am a farmer and prefer the sun and after various life events, we moved to Live Oak.
What prompted you to run?
I passionately care about people, especially our most vulnerable.
Most of my closest friends are seniors and I was shocked to hear from our seniors when the current supervisor first entered office that he fired two senior women volunteers from their commission seats instead of allowing them to complete their term, which is customary, and replaced them with his own friends.
My friends on the Elderly and Disabled Transportation Commission felt changes the incumbent was making left members feeling disempowered.
A number of seniors asked me to run because they have not felt heard nor did they feel their needs were being met by the incumbent. Since our seniors are our most rapidly growing demographic in our community, it is critical we ensure they have a voice in our community and provide systems that allow them access to a vibrant life.
It became evident as I attended the Regional Transportation Commission that the incumbent had his own agenda separate from the will of the majority of our community members. I was later approached by school board members who said the same thing, the incumbent had not shown up for them.
Having lived in Happy Valley, I was aware that fire board and community members in the rural areas were not getting their needs met — they felt mostly ignored by the incumbent and were planning on running a candidate. I met with that person and he decided to support my campaign.
The incumbent has focused energy on the needs of a few groups of people in the district, mostly wealthier areas like Pleasure Point and along the cliffs. It became important to me to challenge the incumbent when so many groups were reporting their needs were unmet.
Will you push back against the state demands for more housing, as the state auditor says those numbers were based on unsupported assumptions? https://www.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2021-125.pdf
This is an area where I want to spend considerable time researching before I make any comments on what should or should not be done.
Our RHNA numbers indicate we need to build about 5,000 units, however the RHNA numbers do not address the degree of our need for affordability. We also need to grow multi-family and multi-generational housing within walking and biking distance to public transit if we are going to effectively provide robust alternatives to using vehicles.
We need to consider rezoning so multi-family can be built in some areas that currently might only be zoned for single-family residences and it makes sense to rezone so markets and cafes can located walking distances from most neighborhoods so a person doesn’t need to hop into a car to buy a dozen eggs.
People in this district feel we are running out of room for new residents. Not enough water, not enough electricity — PG&E brownouts — and potholes instead of well-maintained roads. What do you say?
This is a complex question because our systems are not built to be conservation oriented and our urban design and infrastructure is poorly designed. For example, we need to make it easier and more affordable for community members set up greywater and water catchment systems.
Currently, it is expensive for people to implement water catchment so only the wealthiest people can afford it. We currently have an economic model, a grossly uneven distribution of wealth, that prevents a flow of capital to our community to the extent needed. As a county at high risk for fire, we should be eligible for grants that help us better prepare for disasters, including road repair on key escape routes.
I support Measure K with the focus that a larger share than 10% needs to be allotted for road repair. Given that we must move rapidly toward clean electrification, the need to ramp up clean power generation with Central Coast Community Energy and consider the potential of creating microgrids is critical.
While there is a gap between our current clean energy production and our future needs, especially as we build more homes, we are working rapidly to address this gap. Water is a critical resource which overall we have been extraordinarily wasteful, and industry is probably a worst offender. However, compared to decades ago, here in Santa Cruz, we are now using less water today per capita than in decades past through stronger conservation practices.
A good amount of water that falls is lost to runoff. We need to move toward implementing water catchment, which will become more necessary as we face intense storms and intense droughts. Seeking additional funding sources is key and having someone who works well with our state and federal legislators is also critical.
As a Democratic State Delegate, I have and will continue to work well with our legislators. We’ve also been warned by representatives that Santa Cruz needs to keep its promises when we receive large sums of grant funds from the state for things like transit and trails.
We can build more housing here in a way that is environmentally wise but we need to take a more systems level approach to doing so. Geneva, Switzerland, is denser than New York City, but you wouldn’t suspect this because of how the Swiss people build.
They are incredibly technically savvy conservationists and we can learn a lot from how other cities do things well.
In the first 10 months of 2023, Santa Cruz County Coroner Stephany Fiore tallied 115 accidental fatal drug overdoses. County health officials want to be more proactive. What more could be done?
It is critical that we target our schools, children and families, to share with them the seriousness of what is going on and how drugs like fentanyl are being delivered to children through seemingly harmless ‘fake’ prescription or over the counter drugs.
The amount of fentanyl it takes to kill a person is so small, it is impossible to detect these high potency synthetic drugs that are killing so many people. The amount of Fentanyl the size of three grains of sand is enough to kill a young person.
Kids in school may buy or sell or offer drugs like oxycodone, Xanax, or Adderall to their friends that they get from an untrustworthy source. These pills look identical to legitimate prescription medications but are synthesized on the black market.
Seven out of ten ‘faked’ pills the DEA has tested have deadly levels of fentanyl! Over 80% of drug related deaths in teens are due to fentanyl.
Kids don’t know that pills that look like prescription drugs are easy to fake and even pharmacists cannot tell a real pill from a faked pill. A kid might get a hold of a pill from a friend thinking it is Xanax, not knowing it is not from a trusted source. Laced with unknown concentrations of fentanyl, one pill can result in sudden death.
Every student should be carrying naloxone and trained on how to use it. We should provide naloxone in all public facilities, just like we now have AEDs.