Interview with City Commissioner

During the candidate meet up posted by the Pittsburgh area young professionals earlier this month There was a question relating to what you thought were the two most important matters in Pittsburgh and why you stated child care and Retaining students of Pittsburgh state to stay living here in Southeast Kansas post-graduation I was wondering why you chose those two topics and if you're re-elected to the city commission how you would work to achieve those goals We have a lot of you know great things going on in our city right now But we've got to kind of grow our population. There was just a summit here on campus And they talked about you know the indicators for housing and for business development all this stuff is good And there's and there's vibrancy and there's energy in this town but what we're lacking is more than one percent per year population growth Pit state students come here. They invest four years of their time in this community And I think that you know, it's just we're missing out on them when they go and they move to other places I know that you know, we might not have the jobs always to to keep those students here

But I think that we've seen a lot of things with with startups and entrepreneur work I'm at the foundry with block 22 You know, I said that broad band and and you know these these jobs of today where people can work from home Maybe that would be an opportunity to keep more students here Other part of this is that you know, you've got these young people with young fresh ideas that are essential Keeping your community going and sustaining Some of what we have going on for the long term on child care We have and it's not just here, you know having direct experience working at the Family Resource Center and even checking in You know frequently with the numbers, you know, there's you know over a hundred kids on a waiting list You know in infant toddler those parents might be you know waiting six months to a year Just to get their kid in good quality accredited child care I think that there are some ways that we could address that, you know

You know providing incentives to expand some capacity to support employer-based care There's actually a newly appointed child care task force that's kind of looking at some of these things and and we do need need more help from the state and In some other places, but I do think there's a few things that the city could do to to make this a priority because it just is such a such a big need