"Balance for a Self-Sustaining Community"

Doug's Plan to Address Community Issues

• Community Safety - Follow the Law
• Fiscal Responsibility - 20% Pay Pension Parity Program Cut
• Water Supply - A Full Loch Lomond Reservoir 24/7/365 Beats Desalination
• Community Development - “Balance For A Self-Sustaining Community”
• Transportation - Regional Vision With Regional Solutions

Community Safety - Follow the Law

• Address gang and other violent criminal activity regionally
• Follow the law and our Oaths of Office

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Fiscal Responsibility - 20% Pay Pension Parity Program Cut

• Implement pay/pension/parity cuts necessary to maintain county financial solvency and avoid bankruptcy, starting from the top
• Establish new pay principle, with no one paid more than our county judges or medical doctors (around $180K/year)
• Emphasize real estate and other taxes and our local economy as revenue sources using highest and best use principle
• Recognize new financial reality – eco and poverty based state and federal funding sources are no longer available

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Water Supply - A Full Loch Lomond Reservoir 24/7/365 Beats Desalination

• Stop $100 million Santa Cruz Desal plant – Consider one possible, properly planned and financed Monterey Bay wide regional facility (Letter to Soquel Creek Water District, 7/5/2000)
• Form one new regional, state created Monterey Bay wide regional water agency/authority similar to and replacing PVWMA (Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency) and other regional districts
• Declare Pajaro and Soquel Creek Water District ground water emergency

Watch Our Inconvenient Truth, Read Our Inconvenient Truth (PDF), Further Reading

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Community Development - “Balance For A Self-Sustaining Community”

• Emphasize local economy in sustainable and green industry based on agricultural, educational, and increased intellectual property development
• Consider UCSC growth/expansion to Watsonville on South County 500 acre campus as part of regional water solution
• Develop and implement workout/divestiture strategy for County RDA properties and projects
• Protect and enhance affordable housing opportunities
  • Consider one county wide unified affordable mobile home rent control and protection program and policy
• Plan and implement consolidation and cost efficiency of public services and simplify and improve Planning and other government regulations
• Fix , maintain, and then keep safe our neglected County roads

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Transportation - Regional Vision With Regional Solutions

• Appreciate that widening Highway 1 is sensible transportation. What the "sensible transportationalists" never address in their anti-widening (and mostly city of Santa Cruz centered) opposition are these four compelling Community needs and realities:

1. The needs of emergency vehicles for health and safety considerations and access to hospitals and emergency facilities and resources.
2. The needs of our two biggest industries here, agriculture (it's workers-who drive on average 100 miles a day to their strawberry fields and it's product, which must be quickly and efficiently moved out of county...) and tourism...ie "intercounty transporation".
3. The needs of our new green and clean electric personal vehicles to have decent and adequate roads for intra county transportation needs.
4. And the reality of Measure J here, which makes the local "growth inducement" anti widening argument so often heard here by "sensible tranportationalists" a specious and locally inapplicable argument against widening our local roads here.

• Consider UCSC Eastern bus/bike access through Encinal St. extension in Harvey West. This is "sensible" transportation, in my view. (http://pogonip.org/southernaccess.gif)
• Push rail modality on newly acquired Southern Pacific right of way supported by UCSC Watsonville expansion ridership

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