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HomeMy WebLinkAbout1/12/2021 Item 08, James Wilbanks, Megan From:Marshall < To:E-mail Council Website Subject:2021-23 Community Priorities Survey Marshall James Business Owner Organizer - BLMCA & DSA December 14, 2020 Re: SLO City 2021-23 Financial Plan. Dear Mayor Heidi Harmon and SLO City Councillors: My name is Marshall James and I am a local business owner and activist. I have taken the 2021-23 Community Priorities survey and wanted to weigh in directly on the forthcoming Financial Plan. Primarily, I want to urge you to view these issues through an intersectional lens, for one cannot address "Homelessness" and not address "Housing" or "Diversity Equity and Inclusion." In addressing one, you are inevitably impacting (hopefully in a positive way) the other concerns. We must see a plan to, say, increase affordable housing, as a potent tool to address all three, as well as Economic Stability, Recovery, and Resiliency. And, as I am sure Councillor Pease can attest, the construction of housing is an opportunity to either lean into sustainability or actively harm the environment. Building with the environment and affordability in mind is a great way to address many disparate concerns. I appreciate deeply that San Luis Obispo is taking active measures to address environmentalism and climate action at the governmental level, and I urge you to maintain and increase this priority. We must do whatever we can to move as quickly as possible to carbon neutrality and then carbon negativity. I appreciate the work of SLO Climate Coalition, Sunrise Movement, and others in pushing for aggressive solutions to our warming climate and I am proud that SLO maintains this as a top priority (and at current totals on OpenTownHall.com, it seems like a majority of SLOcals agree.). I hope to see more emphasis on active steps SLO can take to become carbon neutral, such as a large reforestation project. A lot of the community would come together to help plant and care for trees if the City provided the plants and the leadership, and in doing so we could bring more nature back to the central coast and carbon sink a sizeable amount of our city's pollution. I also want to speak strongly in favor of increasing efforts around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. SLO has fared well under the last few years in pushing for DEI Taskforce and other symbolic initiatives to address DEI priorities. SLO City Council declared racism a public health crisis in June of 2020. SLO established the DEI Task Force as a resource to analyze and make recommendations, however a task force is not enough to combat racism as a public health crisis. The American Medical Association House of Delegates adopted a new policy in 2020 to begin addressing the issue by “encourag\[ing\] governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations to increase funding for research into the epidemiology of risks and damages related to racism and how to prevent or repair them.” Creating a permanent office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion would be a good next step in not only addressing these issues but also in symbolically demonstrating a permanent commitment by SLO to the goals of DEI. We must not let the DEI Task Force be the end to combating racism and to do so would be irresponsible and seen as an empty gesture. As seen in the draft of recommendations from the DEI Task Force Agenda Correspondence (12/9/2020 Item 3, Magee), simply “requir\[ing\] cultural competency training for police,” is not sufficient for making structural changes to oppose systemic racism. 1 I strongly support the recommendation of the DEI Taskforce that this office includes a paid position for a representative consultant from the local Chumash tribe; we acknowledge the brutal role colonialism and exploitation by settlers against the indigenous people of SLO County, and we cannot hope to make amends without direct input and guidance from the Chumash people themselves. Homelessness is currently sitting as the most-voted-for issue on the community survey, and I am glad to see so many of my neighbors united in this way. We must be proactive as people in SLO face an disease epidemic alongside homelessness, issues with affordable housing, mental health and carceral systems which are systemically rooted with racism. Reallocating funds to give social services and similar resources more funding is community care. We have funds misallocated to policing that could be used to improve our ability to care for our unhoused neighbors. Suggestions for recommended adopted budget augmentations, new budget augmentations and divestments to balance out added budget augmentations were suggested in a six page budget recommendation document to the SLO Board of Supervisors from Black Lives Community Action (BLMCA) in August 2020. I urge council members to revisit community members’ specific recommendations in that document. Reallocating funds from the sheriff/coroner’s budget to the social services and similar resources suggested is imperative to community members’ lives. While I understand our current police station is old and cramped, now is not the time to rebuild their station, and certainly not at a cost as high as $50 million. For less than a tenth of that, we could have a robust system in place to handle our unhoused crisis. We could employ mental health counselors and drug addiction specialists to address these issues head on, all while reducing police duty loads. At this point, the police have been receiving the lion's share of city funding every year and from their displays this summer during the uprising, it is clear they have misspent their lavish funding on military weapons and armor instead of station maintenance. This mistake in budgeting should fall on the police themselves, not on the citizens of SLO, many of whom have suffered under the brutality and indiffierence of the SLOPD. If every citizen in SLO is having to tighten their belts during this recession, so surely should the SLOPD. They should sell off their riot gear, teargas, and weaponry, downgrade their force, and hold steady through this catastrophe as we all must. Now is the time to spend on people who are suffering, not police. This is a result of systemic racism and is affecting individuals of SLO. We must move to identify the root cause of the issue of racism being a public health crisis and begin work now to improve the quality of life for current and future generations in the city of SLO. Thank you for your work and your continued dedication to making our city welcoming, sustainable, and equitable. Sincerely, Marshall James 859-552-5524 Co-founder of Time Traveler Media "Sending Messages into the Future!" 2