Fort Bragg City Council candidates discuss obstacles to progress

This five-part series of Q&As with Fort Bragg City Council candidates runs each weekday with a wrap-up on Saturday. Each installment presents a key question alongside responses from the seven candidates who responded to the Mendocino Voice. Today’s question:

What do you think is Fort Bragg’s greatest obstacle to achieving progress and fulfilling goals? Can the City Council mitigate that problem?

Scott Mayberry Fort Bragg’s greatest obstacle is not a lack of good ideas—it is trying to meet too many needs with a limited economic and financial base without always establishing clear priorities and following projects through to completion.

The city depends heavily on tourism, while many residents struggle to find stable, well-paying jobs. At the same time, Fort Bragg faces deteriorating streets and alleys, vacant storefronts, neglected properties, limited healthcare access, and other serious needs. When city government spreads its attention and resources too broadly, essential services can be neglected, and residents may see planning and discussion without enough visible improvement.

The City Council can mitigate this problem. It should set a small number of measurable priorities, fund essential services first, establish realistic timelines, and regularly report results to the public. Council members must also be willing to reconsider programs that are not producing the intended results and redirect resources where they will have the greatest benefit.

Progress will require cooperation and compromise, but compromise should not mean avoiding difficult decisions. The Council’s responsibility is to listen to the entire community, establish priorities, and ensure that city government delivers practical results.

Jason Godeke The City’s remote location is both an obstacle and a strength. Remoteness raises the cost of materials, fuel and supplies, and isolates our residents from some essential services, such as health care. It also makes it more challenging to diversify our economy. 

How best to take advantage of our particular remote geography? The new municipal broadband utility is one significant strategy toward diversifying our economy, by creating an affordable and highly functional context for remote workers and businesses. The City’s ongoing support of Blue Economy initiatives is another way to leverage our proximity to the ocean and our working harbor. Expanding on recreational and eco-tourism opportunities, with development of hiking and biking trails and tracks, can further enhance quality of life and visitor experiences.

Tess Albin-Smith Economic Diversity (the need for)

I already laid out Fort Bragg’s problem with dependence on tourism and the lack of good paying skilled jobs with benefits. I think a city can only achieve economic diversity by staying away from any single dominant industry, and supporting multiple sectors, businesses, and workforce skills.

We’ve recently laid some of the groundwork—by installing high speed internet to facilitate light industry business, people working at home, students/colleges, entrepreneurs and others with skilled jobs to work here.

But now the city can partner with businesses, healthcare, and the schools. We can:

• Offer small business grants, incubator spaces and training programs to help local startups grow in non-traditional sectors.

• Work with the local community colleges to provide training programs so residents have the modern skills employers need.

• Encourage production of goods and services of value to outside markets, bringing new wealth into the local economy.

People often ask me what I mean by light industry…my favorite example is the movie industry. What if companies that already come to film commercials and movies stayed permanently to do film editing, building sets, recording music, editing, etc.? Another possibility is university extension establishing a research center for sea research.

Mary Rose Kaczorowski Fort Bragg’s biggest obstacle is economic uncertainty. Like many small cities, Fort Bragg faces the challenge of limited resources in an increasingly expensive and uncertain environment. The cost of infrastructure, housing, construction and providing basic services continues to rise, while our ability to generate revenue is limited. At the same time, we are affected by decisions made at the state and federal levels that are outside the city’s control.

This should not be an obstacle. The City Council can meet challenges by setting clear priorities, planning ahead, protecting the City’s financial stability, pursuing grant funding and making careful decisions about what the City can realistically take on.

We also need to recognize that Fort Bragg cannot do everything at once. We need to identify the priorities that will have the greatest benefit for residents and focus our limited resources on achieving them. Housing, gas and food prices are rising, and Fort Bragg’s distance from major markets adds transportation costs to everything we buy. We should pursue energy efficiency and local renewable energy to help control long-term costs. We also need to advocate for and pursue state and federal funding so essential infrastructure improvements do not fall disproportionately on existing residents and businesses.

Richard Ulveling I believe one obstacle is the difficulty of turning community concerns and ideas into practical action.

Fort Bragg has many people who care deeply about this community. We need to make sure residents, businesses, city staff, and the Council are communicating effectively and working toward common goals.

The City Council can help by listening to residents, setting clear priorities, following through, and communicating honestly about what can and cannot be accomplished.

Not every problem can be solved overnight, and the Council cannot do everything by itself. But elected officials can bring people together, identify realistic solutions, establish timelines, and hold themselves accountable for progress.

I believe good local government starts with listening. If a resident has a genuine concern, I want to hear it, take notes, and bring it forward for discussion when appropriate.

Mary Ann Schmidt The greatest obstacle is the disconnection from self, each other and the Earth which makes life possible. “Progress” is unsustainable because resources are limited. The indigenous peoples of this region had food systems that were thousands of years old, plentiful fish and food from tending the land. Without truly grieving this loss, we cannot move forward in a right way.

Each city council meeting can start with a land acknowledgement to promote connection to self, each other and the Earth. Fort Bragg can create a memorial within the mill site to honor and grieve all the losses together. We can unite in our grief to heal and grow together to shift our city to a regenerative culture that promotes radical responsibility to become a healthy and happy community. Reckoning with past traumas, individual and collective, we can move forward from survival to thriving. 

Marcia Rafanan The stalled redevelopment of our Mill Site and the ongoing litigation with Mendocino Railway has stopped progress. The City Council absolutely can mitigate this situation, particularly resolving the litigation, something I have been working on for years on the City Council. The quicker we get that done the better, and there has been some real progress in collaboration with our current City Manager, Isaac Whippy. Once that is set aside, we can return to our stalled planning processes for the Mill Site’s future and the future of our entire community. The City Council makes the decisions about how we handle litigation, as well as the policy choices concerning zoning and land use. Those decisions will help determine what actually happens on the Mill Site so it is critical that our City Council understands the community’s needs and shared goals so we can represent all segments of our community. 

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Levi Cooke did not respond to requests to participate.