Rob Smoke

I’ve lived here since 1986 — twenty years at the same address in central Boulder. In spite of some personal challenges, I feel pretty good about living here and have no particular desire to move. The trend of the current city council has been to be arrogantly dismissive of people who only want what most of the world obviously wants — an end to the genocide occurring in Gaza. There might be other big issues for Boulder, but this happens to be the moral issue of the day — and council’s stance runs counter to the way most people feel. I’d like to help change the obviously unfortunate outcome regarding our public conversation.

I believe that the camping ban has had poor results in terms of making Boulder better or safer. Boulder has, for at least the past two decades, been running in place on a treadmill in terms of solving anything. We need to stop having to make the police the go-to resource. Doesn’t mean they don’t do their best, but we have ample evidence to suggest that current policies are inadequate in terms of addressing the issues related to “urban camping,” which is something people do not for amusement, generally, but because they can’t obtain housing. I believe there’s a better way and this issue would be second only to the need for divestment from corporations profiting from the extreme suffering in Gaza.

Yes, I think the City needs a pragmatic approach to what it demands and where. Homes with an adjacent position to open space probably need more treatment than homes in central Boulder — although we have had some extraordinary fires in central Boulder. On the other hand, if we’re talking about something like de-juniperizing the entire city, I think that might be problematic.

The world, generally speaking, understands that genocide is occurring in Gaza. How then does a super-majority of council manage to simply look away and allow itself to invalidate the legitimate feelings of psychological pain, moral injury and general distress that people are experiencing? The evidence is overwhelming — we know it’s not about Israel defending itself when tens of thousands and quite likely hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children, are being murdered at an industrial scale. If elected, I will immediately demand a fresh look at divestment from companies that profit from the suffering in Gaza.

I grew up in one of tens of thousands of apartments built by legislation supporting co-operative low- to middle-income housing. The legislation, passed in 1955, created a very clear formula for collaboration between governmental agencies and NGOs interested in creating affordable housing. I would like to see the city generate at least one pilot project to gain an understanding of the “equity framework” and whether or not the program can be expanded.

Firstly, I would realign middle and upper level employees’ salaried compensation via adjustments taken from data collection from similarly sized municipalities. Separately, I would give a closer review of the technical aspects of integrated benefit management. I believe in certain types of pragmatic “best practices” implementation; I have a background that applies to this type of situation.