Community Meet & Greet with City Council Candidate Steve Pleich

If you're buying the Pizza Steve...

Hi Steve,

I know you are one of the venerable founding activists of the Freedom Sleepers protest. I appreciate that. This is what I consider good, progressive-activist leadership. Activist leadership indicates what someone will actually do on the job, once they are in office. Efforts like yours for the Freedom Sleepers mean more to me as a voter, than the easy words that some politicians state, Steve. Thank you.

What's more, however, I need to scrupulously analyze the candidate's positions in regards to the moratorium on legal sleeping anywhere outside at night in Santa Cruz. This law is commonly known as the "sleeping ban". It is just one law among many that is used to target and stigmatize “the homeless” and get the poor to move on. Steve, would you please respond here to my need to know?

Best Wishes on your campaign. I am adding a post script to elaborate. (See below).

Elise Casby

P.S. To elaborate more on how I will be evaluating the candidates, please read on.
Here are some further opinions and ideas that I am concerned about in this election. All of these thoughts center around a paradigm shift in policy, including real earth friendly environmental design for our times, and economic justice. These ideas translate into a more diverse, functional and lively city, should the change of council go the way it needs to go for effective leadership for the 99%, including the animals, redwood trees, and other species.

Ever since 2 people (each are supposedly progressive) who rather lately threw their hats into the ring, announcing that they are running for a seat on City Council, too, (rather too late, IMHO), I am no longer certain about which 4 people I will vote for. There are a set of issues I deeply care about, and then there is everything else I want to see change in city government here, now. It is all critical to how Santa Cruz will develop. But it is about more than Santa Cruz.

Way more. In the past, Santa Cruz was a leadership city, like a lighthouse for the rest of the world that was a guiding beacon toward the future with it’s organic farming focus, strong environmental stewardship and liberal leanings that came to some extent from the city leaders in office and the young generation in the sixties and seventies who envisioned the way. The young leaders of those years who came into office then and in the eighties made things happen with activism, like Lighthouse Field.

In recent years, the city has backslid into becoming just another uptight capitalist bastion by the sea, the provision of the Lenco, BEARCAT is just one strong piece of evidence indicating this sadly stale and sinking state of affairs here. Santa Cruz is now pretending to be liberal while in practice is more hard right, elitist and gentrified, uptight, mean and often fascistic. Government processes are largely secretive. There is a green veneer here. The United States and most of the world is being held back by the elites and their operatives in institutions and government.

I want to see clear decisive action taken, right away by the new city council next year to stop the criminalizing of so called, "homeless" people. But this is just one of a set of actions that I feel strongly about, and I want to see real concrete change of policy from the new city council, and I plan to vote accordingly. In fact, the entire re-framing of all issues needs to change and happen in our city and everywhere in the United States. We humans are in trouble, and a new paradigm, a new understanding and a completely different framing up of the issues is essential if we are going to not kill off democracy, the poor, the environment and the world.

We are only going to shift our dangerous direction if, and only if we understand the changes that need to happen in how we frame the issues that need to be addressed. We no longer can do what we are used to doing, normal is no more. Do you know what I am talking about here, Steve? If I sound challenging, I am being sincere.

Here is one way for me to begin to address the change that is needed. I believe there is a hate filled agenda here in Santa Cruz that is being backed by those of status and money in our town in order to get those without housing or shelter here in our city to have to "move on" to another place to live. The stigmatization of “the homeless” is a way of engendering social engineering to keep people shopping and distract from all the destruction of others, the environment, and greater democratic processes.

"All the better", these elite people and their political operatives think, for (their) property values to increase, and for their cronies and themselves to get the greater share of the pie as the city develops, in the old way, for the most part. The people who lead our current city council, show an adverseness to really understand that their thinking is outdated in the extreme, because climate change changes everything, as Naomi Klein writes.

The way these insiders think on City Council is not going to get us the changes that we humans and other species need to see, now. More than ever, we need very creative, strong progressive leadership with visionary imaginations, and pragmatic focus. We are about 100 years behind in our thinking and policy approaches, as the book, “Overshoot, the Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change” addressed as far back as the nineteen eighties. (1982, William R. Catton, Jr.)

I want to vote to make sure that we do have a more truly, "evidence based" discussion on the shrinking numbers of middle class, lower income groups and poor people here in Santa Cruz. While the homeless get the blame, the elites use a focus on this demographic of very poor and demeaned people to shift the attention. That is, these elites keep the spotlight away from the developer's deals in our city council's backrooms (and at the county level, too), the shady deals and insider political discussions, for an increasingly narrow set of interests here by targeting the homeless.

This bearing down of the spotlight on the so called, problem of “the homeless”, keeps an increasingly narrow demographic existing here in Santa Cruz and allows the closing of government process and creation of a strong arm-plutocracy here in Santa Schmooze. These forces are not future oriented in their environmental thinking, nor their thinking about community and environmental, innovative design for the new city needed for our times. They are old in their thinking; backward sliding. They love to congratulate themselves on their environmental policies. In reality we are far, far behind where we need to be to have a healthy, vibrant city here in Santa Cruz, and in the wider region, state and world.

My vote depends to a large extent on what the (now) 5 candidates state about what they will do pertaining to the issues of encroaching enclosure, lack of freedoms around activities at night in parks, (such as sleep), gentrification. For example, the Santa Cruz Seaside Company is making a whole lot of money, while they take full advantage of the public asset of the beach. I would like to see a greater part of their profits go toward helping those who live here and are not rich rather than those who schmooze in the inner circles of status/and wealth here. The debates totally have to change here in Santa Cruz for us progressives to get anything like what we really need in the way of mitigation, resiliency, and diversity.

I am staunchly in favor of choosing a candidate who will get more shelters and shelter beds built here in the City of Santa Cruz, immediately, for single adults. This is my top request for any so called, "progressive candidate" in this election, Steve.

I also firmly believe we need to reinstate more feeding of the poor as a city program, as well as have the city enforce the provision of more jobs by local businesses, and more jobs need to be developed by the city and all parties here so that more of us will be able to stay here. Only the affluent can afford this city. For greater diversity in our city to actually be encouraged, a living wage needs to be legislated ($15 per hour) immediately, in Santa Moola-Cruz. The status quo, in reality as well as in the framing-up of issues ends up causing us to have an expanding underclass, lack of democracy and a sterile reign of the few at the top of city government, and other problems here in our increasingly fascist city. Outside of “indybay", our media is hardly helpful. The entire debate needs to change.

I would appreciate your response to my question here Steve. I am also going to be asking the other 4 candidates for their responses to my questions here. Depending on their answers, I will figure out my vote.

Thanks again for the effort you led and for your actual work for those called, "the homeless", Steve.

Sincerely,

Elise Casby