Columbia City Council Fourth Ward candidates: Councilman Nick Foster

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

ABC 17 News is interviewing candidates for key races in the April municipal elections. Today's interviews feature Columbia Ward 4 candidates Ron Graves and incumbent Nick Foster.

The interviews will air on ABC 17 News leading up to the April 8 election and will be posted online as they air. Read the interview with Councilman Nick Foster below:

ABC 17 News reporter Haley Swaino: Why are you running and what are your qualifications?

Nick Foster: I'm running because I feel like we've gotten a lot accomplished over the last three years, and I really just want to build on those accomplishments and continue moving forward. I think that there are some things we want to see happen, and I believe we're in a good place moving forward. We have some good energy in that direction.

So, I just want to be a part of that and I feel like my three years on the council qualify me all the more. I came into the position feeling like I was qualified, that I had a good sense of what the city is, what our values are, how the city government works. And I have learned a whole lot more in the last three years. And I think that's true for every City Council member. It can sort of be overwhelming how much you learn in the course of being on the council. There's a lot of information that comes your way. It takes some time to be able to digest that process and then make use of it. So it's been a good experience and I feel like I'm even more qualified than I was the first time around.

Swaino: What do you see as top priorities for the city and why?

Foster: Well, there are a number of them. Housing is a big issue. I think the housing crisis is something that we are addressing. And this is a good example of some progress we've made over the past three years. We set up the housing department, brought neighborhood services into that same department. This gives us the focus every single day to address the needs that we have. And I hear a lot about this from folks who are concerned about the ability to move into the kind of housing they would like to have. So we need housing across the income spectrum. We got the housing study done. We got a presentation of that in October. The City Council and the (Boone) County Commission are working together. We we did this in partnership with the county and the city.

The city-county relationship continues as we're meeting with one another on a regular basis to move that ball forward. The study gives some very specific goals for the city, in terms of the type of housing we need and provides some recommendations about how we can go about it. So, I think it's about taking what we know about our own situation and putting those together with the recommendations. We have to move us where we want to go in terms of the housing that we need in the community. So, those are among the things that we have done. And we also, by the way, set up a new housing trust fund and the funds from that will be used, I imagine, to incentivize some construction and that kind of thing.

And we also need to be looking really closely at our codes, our policies for construction, so that we can ease some of those barriers that are there, that are keeping some construction happening that we need to have happen. That's that's one of the things I can call a long time on housing.

I guess I would go ahead and say that some of the other things we need to address are public safety. Public safety is one of those things that is high on the minds of very many people. I think in this area, too, we're making some important and good strides. Staffing for the police department has been an issue for some time and we're making real progress in that direction. My understanding is that about we had about 29 vacancies back in September and through the good work of the department and our own human resources department, that number is down to about 14 or 15 at this point. We're moving in the right direction. We started our own police academy here in the city, and a couple of weeks ago we had our first graduation of that group. We had 14 to go into the academy, we had 14 to come out of the academy. And that's really good. That doesn't always happen that way. There usually are people almost always, I think, people who drop out of the training, but we managed to get them all through there. And I think that's largely because it's it's our program and we're training on our systems. That means that when those recruits who become sworn officers graduate, they're moving right into a system with which they're familiar. And we're recruiting the people that we want to be on our police force. So all of that is in a good place.

We approved the use, the purchase and use of a Flock camera system, which is largely about license plates, plate readers. This will be a force magnifier and will help us to close cases quicker. Our police department is really good at that, but this ought to help them do that even better. So we've done a number of things that way.

Infrastructure is a big issue. We have had some successes with infrastructure, again over the past three years, with the introduction of roll carts. I've been hearing from people that, even people who were not sure about roll carts, who've decided that's not so bad. In fact, they kind of like it. And that's good to hear. We also got the water-plan upgrades going, and that was something that had been sitting around for a few years. And I know there was a lot of frustration about that. And I understand that frustration. And now, we need to focus on electric line transmission into our city and with the anticipated increase in electrical use, but also the need for redundancy, we need to address that soon. We also in that same area, need to address issues related to climate change, protecting our environment, and in particular increase the use of renewable energy that the city uses.

So those are those are the things that I think we need to look at.

Swaino: What is your vision for the future of Columbia’s public safety and how would you get us there?

Foster: Well, we want to have a safe community. A place where everyone feels safe, wherever they are in the community. I know there's a lot of concern, and I've already mentioned this about increasing the staff and having a fully-staffed police department. Everyone agrees that this is true and that includes the council. Each year I've been on council, we have approved a budget that provided for a full employment of officers in the police department.

That's true now, I fully anticipate that will be true with the next budget as well. The problem has been recruitment, but we have addressed that in a really good way. And some of the other things that I've already mentioned in terms of giving them the tools that they request and that they need. So I remain open to hearing from police leadership, Chief Schlude in particular, about what their needs are and then how the council can best respond to that. That's one of the things.

We also started, got started, the Office of Violence Prevention, and that has a leader now who will start on March 31. We made a great hire there, D'Markus Thomas-Brown is going to be a great leader in that way. He already is working in this area. He knows the people in the community. He's a chaplain on the police force. So I'm just very, very pleased about that.

I'm for cutting off violence at its root. And in particular, I'm concerned about gun violence. And I think that's true for a lot of people. We have a lot of young people in our community who are getting access to guns and and using them. And we need to address that. And I was really pleased that the police department recently was able to confiscate a large number of guns. I read the press release and kind of went through it and went, wow, one after another after another. It was a long release, which indicates to me that there was a lot of great work that went into that and reduced the number of guns that are available in the community. We we need more of that.

I want to point out one of the things the in the general fund, over half of the general fund, close to 60%, if not 60%, goes to public safety and over half that amount goes to the police department. So we're funding the police department in the way that it needs to be, in the way that's requested. And we'll continue to do that, I think.

Swaino: How specifically would you use the city’s tools and resources to increase access to affordable housing?

Foster: Well, I have a concern there. One of those concerns is that we do have a good bit of federal funding that comes in the community development block grants and the home program. Both are funded by the federal government and we do use those monies to move people into housing and to address issues of infrastructure, and so on.

I'm concerned about what's happening at the federal level and how that might impact our ability to use that kind of funding. It really is critical. I mentioned the Housing Trust fund. I think that is one thing that we did fund from excess revenues. It's revenue and that will go a long way and we will learn how to best use that. The Community Land Trust is a tool that we continue to use.

And then when it comes to homelessness, we have a number of groups in the community who are working on that in different ways and having some success. I was looking at some numbers just today, and month over month, we saw a reduction in the number of people who are on the priority list that's used to address homelessness. So that's a good sign. And it's an amazing thing actually, in light of the fact that we are so limited in terms of the amount of housing that we have for, especially for, low-income folks in our community. So that happens through the Boone County Coalition to End Homelessness.

I meet with the Boone County Coalition on Homelessness every month, and I'm also with the Affordable Housing Coalition, which is a grassroots group of different folks who are interested in this and involved in it, and we're seeing some impact that way. We need to be more creative, I think, and innovative in what we're doing with housing. I could talk about this a long time, but I had the chance the other day to see a new project that's being done by the Columbia Housing Authority, Kinney Point. And Kinney Point, they have these duplexes which are really interesting. They are not side by side, but they're back-to-back. And so they're sort of a tiny home concept but puts two of them together. And I really think that's something we could replicate in other parts of the city. So it's that kind of innovation that I'm looking to see happen.

Swaino: If you received a $1 million grant to use for the city any way you wanted, what would you do with it and why?

Foster: That's a good question. What would I do? A million dollars is a lot of money. I honestly think that I would find a way to use it toward housing. You can do a lot, you could do a lot with a million dollars in that way.

So I would look to probably implement some of the same kinds of things that we're looking at with the housing trust fund and just invest it in the trust fund so that we would, because one of the things we face is how we continue to fund that, that fund. It is going to be critical to do it. If somebody gave me a million dollars, I'd be sorely tempted to just simply place it in the housing trust fund for so that we'd have more resources to use there.

Swaino: Is there anything else you would like people to know about your platform?

Foster: Yeah. One thing in particular that stands out, and this came for me in responding to one of the questionnaires that we receive from folks who were doing forums, was the League of Women Voters Forum that I was preparing for. And as I wrote through that, I ended up writing five pages. I just kept writing and writing. They ended up only wanting one page, so I had to do some really painful editing on that piece. But one thing I came to as I was, as I was working my way through it, is that I think our greatest single challenge as a city may be our growth. We have been growing at an expansive rate for a number of years, really for decades. And some people would argue, I think as long as we've been around, we can anticipate that continuing to be true.

So all of the things that we are facing, I think in terms of infrastructure, housing, homelessness, public safety, all of these are deeply affected by our growth. And I'll give you one good example. When we talk about public safety, we have a tendency to really talk about the police. Well, the fire department and joint communications, the people who send people, who answer the 911 calls. Those folks are deeply involved in public safety, as well. And with the fire department, we recently opened a new firehouse. It was a, I guess it was a little over a year ago now, Firehouse 11, which is down in the southwest part of the city. And you can easily see if you go down there, that's where a lot of growth has happened. That's where we need a firehouse. Well, that's been done and that required more staffing. We, the council, approved the funding to do that. Firehouse 10, which is out in the eastern part of the city and will be along route WW, that is going to be built soon and we'll need more staffing for that too. Both of those are indications of our growth as a city, a lot of growth out in that part of the city as well.

So these are the kind of things that I think challenge us in a lot of ways. We've grown a lot as a city. We probably need to look at staffing for police, too. But how do we maintain the services that we provide as a full service city as we grow and as demand grows with that? These are some large challenges. So, it's kind of an umbrella look for me at, at all of the issues that we face and how our growth as a city impacts all of the services we provide.