1. Change housing regulations to make it easier to rent individual rooms, or a portion of a home. Currently, our mentality creates a gap: either an apartment – or homelessness. This is both wrong and unnecessary.
2. a. increasing the amount of the MFIP (welfare) grant, I looked at the State House Research department’s most recent report on this – dated 2010. I’m not sure what the impact of the increase in the minimum wage will be on this. I think the MFIP transitional grant should be indexed to inflation. b. working towards a Guaranteed Annual Income at either Federal or State level I don’t think it is realistic to think this can be achieved at either level. I am a human being, with limited time and resources. For these reasons I wouldn’t favor what I would anticipate to be wasted effort.
c. support for universal single payer health care? It looks to me that Obamacare is in serious trouble. As I see it, the underlying problem is the AMA’s monopoly on the supply of MDs. I strongly favor an across the board requirement to increase the admissions to medical schools nationwide – possibly by as much as 100% -- to require a percent of those admitted commit to practicing in rural areas for a number of years, and to also require a percent commit to being GPs rather than specialists. To me, the supply of MDs is the key to both better medical care and more medical care. I think single payer is a good idea – but we saw what happened when Hillary tried it. Here is the reality: if you try to eliminate any significant sector of our economy (HMOs and medical insurance are such a sector), that sector will fight back ferociously. This is why single payer is so difficult to achieve. I am not inclined to pick battles that almost certainly cannot be won.
3. I’m strongly in favor of both exploring the eminent domain option, and providing affordable rental housing by any means possible. More generally, I want to assign significant resources from the City Attorney’s office to provide legal services to Minneapolis residents who have been harmed, are being harmed, or are in danger of harm, from the foreclosure crisis. Beyond this, I believe the office of Mayor can be a bully pulpit to advocate for the strongest possible measures to deal with both the foreclosure crisis, and the more general financial crisis. Attached are some slides I prepared for a teach in given this past week just before the Occupy All Committee meeting. I believe there are good prospects for accomplishing a lot on this issue, and I would make it one of my three top priorities (the other two are transit, and changing regulations to make rental easier).
4. I frankly think it’s too late – the design and construction phase is already underway, commitments have been made, money has been spent. Any attempt to stop the stadium now would be likely to put the City at risk for hundreds of millions in legal liability. If I could be persuaded that this risk was minimal or non-existent I would be willing to reconsider, but all my experience tells me those risks are all too real, and it is simply too late to do anything about this.
5. I’m not planning to seek organizational endorsements in general – I think it would be unrealistic to expend such effort. Since they’re not going to offer it, I’ll decline to say what I would do based on a null hypothesis.
6. My understanding is that this is the Hennepin County Sheriff’s responsibility. I would assign zero priority to the use of City police resources to aid banks in evictions resulting from foreclosures. As already noted, I plan to use the office of Mayor as a bully pulpit to bring the banksters to account.
7. Maybe I’m cynical, but I don’t think this would be going forward if Xcel didn’t want it to go forward. My gut feeling is that Xcel probably wants to dump an infrastructure they’ve run into the ground on Minneapolis taxpayers. After the Xcel merger, David Hanners (Pioneer Press, Pulitizer prize winner) did about a hundred articles or more on Xcel’s across the board failure to do maintenance. I would not campaign for a “yes” vote, for the reasons stated. I would prefer to see Xcel held responsible for paying for needed improvements, and have those improvements paid for through their general rate structure – a broader base than Minneapolis tax payers and rate payers.
8. See point 10 below – I decline to answer because I think point 10 represents a preferred solution.
9. I don’t know enough about what equipment has been acquired. If I’m elected, I’ll allocate sufficient time to talk to Dave Bicking about this – that’s all for now.
10. This sounds like a very good idea that merits extensive study. I can see at least two major advantages to this approach. First, police officers that abuse their position are likely to be unable to obtain insurance, and will have to leave the force. The enforcement mechanism for removing those officers would be out of the hands of both the police federation and the courts. Second, the City’s risk would be likely to go down significantly, since insurance companies will be making the decisions about how to defend against claims, and since awards are unlikely to go beyond the policy limits. One of the problems with our current system is that because the city is effectively self-insured, there is no cap on a potential jury award – this puts a lot of pressure on the city to settle simply as a way of mitigating financial risk.
11. With the possible exception of incredibly favorable land swaps – and I mean INCREDIBLE -- my answer is a resounding “No.” I testified last week trying to stop the Bread and Pickle from being able to serve alcohol at Lake Harriet. Our parks used to be 100% free of any commercial message whatsoever – except on tea shirts, and that of course is free speech. I remember years ago riding on my bike, and seeing a little Chiquita banana label (an inch by half an inch oval) on a street sign along a bike path. I stopped to scrape it off – we don’t allow commercial advertising in parks! Once, riding along the Kennelworth trail, I saw someone had a bicycle baby carriage – the kind you tow with a bike -- on the edge of the path, with a for sale sign. I called 9-1-1 -- again, we don’t allow commercial advertising in parks. The commercialization of our park system is of great concern to me. Fortunately, unlike some of the more economically pressing issues raised earlier, it’s something where citizen action has a good prospect of success. As already noted, my perception of the likelihood of success in any effort is a major consideration in what I will and won’t attempt.
12. In general: I’ve studied urban gardening in significant detail – visit my web site, BobAgain.com for a 20 page report on this -- and I was absolutely amazed at the potential for gardening. In particular it’s a great way to put land to productive use in low income neighborhoods, and to give kids in low income neighborhoods a way to earn some money during the summer, and to learn about entrepreneurship and small business.
13. In general I am strongly in favor of new kinds of households, and increasing the number of people in households. Our biggest economic challenge today is providing enough jobs – frankly my own gloomy assessment is that it cannot be done any time soon – statistically there are about 10 million Americans who were working in 2007-08, who are not working now, and who quite likely will never work again. What a disaster! We are in the midst of an Abundance Crisis – the productive capacity of a post industrial society is so great that everything everyone needs can be produced with only a fraction of people working. The result is an abundance of labor – otherwise known as unemployment. We need to cause a scarcity of labor – that is the only market-based way to cause the price of labor to rise. I’m in favor of other approaches as well – but giving people better options than the paid labor market is the surest and most effective method of increasing wage rates.One way to produce this scarcity is to allow new forms of households – including all of the options your questionnaire identifies. There is no economic unit more inefficient than a single person household – unfortunately my understanding is that America has the highest percentage of single family households of any country in the world. Obviously the first step is to allow all the kinds of housing options identified in the questionnaire. Beyond this, we need to alter the tax code to provide incentives for these kinds of households. One example is to allow dependent tax deductions for everyone in a household without regard to marriage or family relationships – the question should be: who is in the household, and therefore depending on the household? A second would be to make all household members – again without reference to family relationships – eligible for all employment benefits. I do think we need restrictions on the density of all the kinds of housing identified above. On the other hand, we should require a minimum density of these kinds of housing also – NIMBY should not be allowed to prevent these housing options from developing, and from being distributed throughout the city.
14. You haven’t asked about transportation – that is my number one issue – As Mayor, I intend to make it the exclusive focus of almost all all my discretionary time and resources. Yesterday I campaigned at the May Day festival at Powerhorn Park, and passed out about 300 campaign cards – the front and back are shown below: When I briefly talked with people about phase one -- using vans to supplement bus service and provide 5 minute service on all city bus routes 7 AM to 10 PM – I received a very strong and favorable reaction. Here’s a politician that’s actually talking about doing something that would be an immediate and significant improvement in people’s lives. My two page information flyer on Phase One is attached. My Transit Revolution consists of five phases – some involve patentable inventions – that I will be rolling out during the campaign. My intention is to get this firmly underway in Minneapolis – and then get out of office as quickly as possible. I plan to campaign on this principle -- that I see Mayor as a part time job (Rybak proved that could be done) – and that my goal is to launch a massive business startup to plan and build the infrastructure for the Transit Revolution worldwide. Of course, with Minneapolis as the hub, the launch and growth of this new business will be a major economic boost to the city and the state. I am running for Mayor to put the Transit Revolution on the ballot, and to let the citizens of Minneapolis DEMAND IT by electing me. We are NOT going to get away from cars until we can and do provide something better. The environmental benefits of getting away from internal combustion cars and moving towards to smaller Neighborhood Electric Vehicles is almost too obvious to mention – but here it is, just for the record!
15. I am running for Mayor so WE THE PEOPLE can DEMAND a TRANSIT REVOLUTION! First: supplement all city bus routes with vans: 5 minute service 7 AM to 10 PM. Second: elevated van transit lanes over Lake Street, from the river to past Calhoun. I’m asking for YOUR VOTE!
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