Voters Deserve to Know How a Candidate Thinks.

By Neal Andrews

Full text of Candidacy Announcement speech and other documents.

Thank you all for coming today to celebrate with me.

It is a celebration!

We have much to be grateful for and much to be proud of as we look back on the last four years. We also have much to look forward to as we prepare for the next four years.

You've been invited here today to share with me the moment of my formal announcement of my candidacy for re-election to the Ventura City Council. This should come as no surprise to those of you who stood with me four years ago when I first announced my candidacy. I promised you then that, if I were elected, I would seriously consider committing at least to a second term. It often takes a long time to make fundamental changes and, when fundamental changes are needed, one must commit to the long run to achieve them.

Fundamental changes were needed then, and some are needed still, while others are underway but require a steady and supporting hand to bring them all the way to fruition.

So here we are, most of us. Sadly some of those who were the strongest of the "true believers" are no longer with us, (Roma Armbrust, my environmental right arm against whose knowledge and insight I could always test the validity of my ecological and environmental principles, Willis Naysmith, the finest and most inspiring example of the human ability to overcome disadvantage and medical disability that I have ever encountered, both passed away; my dear friend, Maxine Culp, a noble champion of the elderly and the poor and ill, has moved to Portland, and there are still many other friends and colleagues who are not among our yeoman today, but who served us well and are here in spirit).

With the passing of time there is always the passing of the torch, and fortunately many others have stood up with us to take that torch and carry on where our friends had pointed the direction. Thank you for your support in being here today and for becoming a member of our new, re-invigorated legion of the future.

We have accomplished a lot in the four years that I have served on the Council. Some that we have accomplished was planned even back then when I first became a candidate, some emerged from the opportunities and the needs that only became evident after I became a member of Council. Still, we have accomplished a lot ... a pretty magnificent bunch of things in the last four years.

We have fundamentally transformed the way Ventura City government operates. That's a pretty heady achievement. We have not only introduced performance management processes to Ventura City government, but we have integrated the belief that accountability of government, the openness of government processes and the alignment of City goals to our people's vision for their government are essential to successful government.

The fact is that others will say that they had something to do with that achievement. Some may even say that they were the indispensable ingredient to success.

The truth is that some did point out the problems of inadequate management, and others even suggested some of the things that needed to be done to effect a change. Nonetheless, I was the only candidate that ran on the explicit program of introducing management change and a new form of leadership to the city four years ago, and we were the only campaign that systematically presented that set of issues to the public. We were the only voices that articulated a program of performance measurement, management accountability, and public responsiveness and empowerment and, after the election, I was the only Council Member that advocated vigorously, systematically and consistently for the changes in management style and Council oversight that has in fact been the foundation of the extraordinary transformation of city government that we see today.

It is true that, since my election in 2001, the majority of our Council have come to embrace many of these ideas. New members of the Council have been elected since then too who also share some of these points of view. That we were able to forge that consensus is indeed the key to our ability today to claim success. You have been a vital part of that. Without you, that consensus may never have been possible. Without you, new members of the Council sympathetic to those views may not have been elected.

The key point, however, is that the foundation of that basic change was set in place with my election and with the subsequent change of City Manager + a change driven by the fact that our views of administrative accountability and management systems had emerged as the public's model of choice, and with the development of a consensus among the Council on that point, the correct choice of a new City Manager had to embrace changes in management approaches and accountability systems throughout the City system.

I predicted in 2001 that, if I were elected, 2001 would represent a watershed year in the history of our City. I was right. Since then we have experienced a "sea change" in this City, and now our task is to drive that dynamic transformation forward to lay the foundation for a great and wonderful community of the twenty-first century.

There have been other very significant achievements.

I sponsored the adoption of the transitional living center for homeless families as a Council major project and, similarly, the adoption of a commitment to facilitate the creation of a cultural arts center, both of which have become City priority programs. With your support these programs continue to move forward.

I also initiated a new effort to conserve water through changes in our building code. Those changes adopted by Council last year are projected to yield savings of 43 million gallons of water yearly for generations. This was a capstone on a successful program of water conservation over the years that has resulted in our City actually consuming no more water today than we did a decade ago + a remarkable feat for a City where water is ultimately the defining natural resource.

In a similar vein, over a period of two years, under the auspices of the Local Government Conference, I supported the development of and contributed to the drafting of the Awahnee Water Principles, a document widely regarded as the Bible of sustainable water management policy and practice in modern urban planning, and I led the effort to incorporate these Principles into Ventura's policy and planning framework. They were adopted unanimously by our Council, and in doing so Ventura became the first City in the nation to make them a component of its formal policy guidelines.

In 2002, I also initiated the effort to strengthen our laws protecting historic treasures and landmarks and the adoption of the Mills Act to provide property owners with incentives to bring their historic homes and buildings into the formal historic preservation system. Those changes, adopted finally in late 2004 and early 2005, have immensely enhanced our ability to preserve and celebrate the magnificent historic and cultural heritage of our City.

On the budgetary front, my leadership played a significant role in the formulation of the plan to effectively re-structure our expenditures and enhance our revenue streams to reverse the structural imbalance in the City budget that has plagued the City since the economic reversals of the late 1990's. We followed a well-defined course consisting of four elements: cost reduction, equitable fees to pay for services, enhanced revenue on existing tax systems, and strategic economic stimuli. Only after these strategies have been implemented were we willing to consider the possibility of taking the question of potential new taxes to the voters.

In the economic arena, I was the principle architect behind the establishment of the Economic Development Fund to be used as a tool to encourage the generation of new high quality, high wage jobs. And I was the main force and the champion who pushed to fulfillment the creation for the first time in memory of a viable and meaningful economic development strategy for the City.

Most recently I have proposed along with my colleague, Deputy Mayor Morehouse, the creation on a joint collaborative public-private employer funded affordable housing program for employees. This program will make housing more affordable for critical employees within the City, will reduce commuting time, decrease traffic, decrease pollution, increase employee morale and productivity, and improve our ability to provide public safety and other critical services to citizens in times of urgency.

In all of these initiatives I have simply been following through on the proposals that you endorsed with that first election campaign and reflecting the philosophy that you embraced with me. Those values and ideas of how government is supposed to work and what it is supposed to do for people that we share together have been the lynchpin of each of these achievements. Your support and enthusiasm have been the essential element in mobilizing the sentiments of our fellow citizens and the energy of our community behind these initiatives. It is that dynamism that has yielded consensus and consideration among a consistent majority of the Council on these core issues.

So, we've achieved an incredible amount of progress in four years, but we have not yet fulfilled our promises to bring all those dreams we talked so proudly and hopefully about four years ago to reality. We still have work to do.

I need your help and your support to complete the dreams.

Remember Boffo the Clown's song, which was a guiding principle of our last campaign: "There's a place somewhere where the sun always shines and rainbows fill the air. And if you try and I try, and maybe just we two try, someday we'll find our way there."

Please join me again this year in a renewed commitment in this campaign to attempt to build a City of sunshine and rainbows for the future and for our children.

Thank you.