Meet Jason Wiener, Ward 1

AGE: 30
OCCUPATION: DirecTV customer service representative
MARITAL OR PARTNERSHIP STATUS: Single
EDUCATION: Wabash College, bachelor's degree in economics and philosophy; University of Montana, master’s degree in philosophy
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Financial analyst, teacher, journalist
MILITARY EXPERIENCE: None
PUBLIC SERVICE: Volunteer for Garden City Harvest, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Missoula Community Market, Missoula Institute for Sustainable Transportation Party
PARTY AFFILIATION: Democrat
ENDORSEMENTS: Missoula County Democrats, Missoula Area Central Labor Council, Missoula Independent, Mayor John Engen, City Councilwoman Heidi Kendall, City Councilman Dave Strohmaier, Rep. Ron Erickson; Chamber of Commerce rating: 1.2 of 3.0.
WEB SITE: http://www.jasonwienerforcouncil.org/

Questions and Answers

What qualifies you to be on the City Council?

“The most important thing that the City Council can do is to bridge the details of the policy that it makes with the values that people hold, and this is what I’ve done all my life. First as a student of philosophy and economics – bringing those two disciplines together – and then later as a financial analyst, teacher and journalist, I have always been able to find the specifics and to integrate those into a larger vision. And this is really what government needs in order to be effective and ethical. … This is what I do when I go to City Council meetings. The chicken question, for instance, is on everybody’s mind and everybody wants to talk about this, and what I see in this debate is a lack of appreciation for the value of pluralism. You have a group of people who are maybe not in the mainstream, but who really cares about wanting to have a connection to their food, and they’ve asked for reasonable regulation of their activity, and a reasonable regulation has been formulated. And then you have a group of people who will say nothing but 'no,' who won’t negotiate on any point, who have no willingness to compromise, and what that shows is an inability to accommodate world views that are not one’s own, and to me that shows a lack of pluralism. And so it’s this kind of, like, catchy, funny thing that we have in this massive debate over chickens, but it’s really about how tolerant are you for the value systems that others might hold.”

What are the best and worst things the City Council has done in recent years?

“One very good thing that they’ve done is they’ve undertaken an effort to rewrite the zoning ordinance. Our zoning ordinances that govern Missoula were written in the 1930s and the 1970s; they may as well have been written for another planet, given the conditions that we’re living under right now. And so the City Council has hired consultants to help us to rewrite that ordinance, to make it something that’s modern and forward looking and can help us deal with the pressures that are coming to us as a city. They have placed an emphasis on having public involvement in that effort – having lots of meetings, listening sessions, hearing what people expect this thing to do, and what they want it to do – and then trying to incorporate all that input, make people feel like they’ve been heard, listened to, even if what comes out maybe doesn’t reflect everybody’s opinion, because it can’t because there are, of course. contradictory positions.”

And the worst thing?

“A couple months ago the City Council considered a revision to the Northside-Westside Neighborhood Plan. This is a plan that was created years ago, I think maybe a decade ago, by some citizens on the Northside neighborhoods to talk about a positive construction vision for what their neighborhood should look like in the future. Neighborhood plans do not have the force of law in Montana and they are merely advisory. It was a very contentious project involving Saint Pat’s Hospital and the Safeway store and the project does not reflect the wishes of the neighborhood, it certainly didn’t at the outset and you could still contend that it doesn’t. There was even a lawsuit that came of that, created a lot of animosity between some of the folks that did that plan and other folks within the city. When they tried to revise their neighborhood plan, the feelings about that and about West Broadway and about a number of other things led City Council representatives, led by one of the representatives of Ward 2, which hosts the Northside and the Westside neighborhoods, to gut the plan. And what they did is they basically said the West Broadway corridor from beginning to end, will be sliced out of this neighborhood. Well, West Broadway is a critical part of that neighborhood, and what those folks envisioned for West Broadway should be part of the vision for their neighborhood. So they did that and it was a really terrible thing because you have this sort of grassroots constructive involvement by a group of citizens, and then you have folks at the highest level of government negating that input and gutting it. It just runs contrary to encouraging citizen involvement and was a very troubling thing.”

What one thing would you most like to accomplish as a member of the City Council?

“The main impetus that drove me to running for City Council was feeling like the people of Missoula do not know and understand how what the council does affects their life daily. City government is the most intimately tied branch of government to people’s everyday lives. It's roads we use, parks we use, neighborhoods we live in. It’s really important stuff; it’s the fabric of everyday lives. But decisions of City Council are very detail-driven – it’s a lot of sometimes tedious policy – and so my ambition is to bridge that, to frame the issues, the details of policy, in terms of the values that people have in Missoula. To make it understandable and comprehensible so people can participate in a meaningful way in what the future of the city is going to look like.”

What can the city do to attract better-paying jobs?

“There’s an interesting assumption framed in that question, which is that we somehow need to pull these better paying jobs from outside of our community, that we have to somehow attract them here. And I actually think that emphasizing the growth of local businesses and providing support to start up entrepreneurs is a better way to go about that. We spent about $10 million to get DirecTV to move here to Missoula. For $10 million we could give an awful lot of help to an awful lot of local businesses, and these are going to be people who get a chance to turn their passion into an occupation. If we’re going to subsidize business, it ought to be these folks who are already contributing to the community, helping them to achieve their aspirations, and to develop an economy with roots in it. When I think about how we can help economic development in Missoula, there’s a whole host of tools in subsidized development. We could provide grants, we could provide loan guarantees. It’s really about which businesses are we going to pick, and my preference there is the same as my preference with most things, which is small and local.”

What should the city do to encourage the development of more affordable housing?

“This is another case where the tools are in place already. You could have an inclusionary zoning ordinance that requires market rate development be accompanied by some sort of affordable component or cash-in-lieu requirement. You could actually do land trust housing with the city itself. This is really where you don’t sell the land, you lease the land out for 75 years, renewable for another 75-year term, and then you sell the house on top of the land. (This) allows people to get into the house at a low equity contribution and then enjoy appreciation as the market goes up, which allows people to move on and move out into nonsubsidized housing. It keeps the market from moving away from the people who are living here. And there are other tools. The question is how are we going to pay for it.

“I like to turn to open space for an analogy on this. Thirty years ago, open space was not a settled question in Missoula. There were hard-fought battles over it, and it took a lot of work and a lot of vision to make it happen. Well, there’s been a sea-change … (W)hat people decided is, ‘We value open space and so we’re willing to pony up at the ballot box for it.’ Well, what does affordable housing give us? I think what it gives us is economic diversity and I think that that’s something that people value in Missoula, is that it’s a place where people of every class can live together. And that’s not going to be the case if we don’t ensure (affordable housing for) people who don’t have income sources from outside of Missoula, who don’t have access to the housing market because the housing costs are being driven by factors from outside of the city. We’re going to lose that economic diversity. And so, it’s really a question ultimately of values and whether the political will exists to do the things that are going to be necessary to pay for affordable housing. Economic diversity is enough of value here in Missoula that that’s where we’ll be in a couple years, I think.”

Should Missoula endorse a troop withdrawal from Iraq? Why or why not?

“I supported placing the referendum on the ballot … because I feel like people are very cynical about government. They feel like their interests are not being represented by the state. People are right to feel that in a certain sense. I mean, government is supposed to work for the public’s benefit, but it’s clear in so many ways it works for a set of private interests, and I think that that sort of cynicism is corrosive to democracy. Now, the war I think is an excellent example of how people feel this way because, and I think it was reflected in the 2006 elections and in the general sentiments that people have about the war, people should be able to organize themselves at levels of government lower than the national level to present a voice of solidarity on an issue on an issue like this that is incredibly important. And so that’s why I supported putting it on the ballot, and I support a ‘yes’ vote on it because the war is clearly impacting the city in so many ways. The city is very stressed to pay for the services that it needs … and one of the main reasons for that is the federal government has taken a smaller and smaller stake in helping with the infrastructure needs of communities like this, while these costs have increased tremendously. And part of that is because we’re spending a lot of money in Iraq. I mean we’re spending to the tune of more than a gigantic road project a day, and I would like to see the federal government shift its priorities toward building infrastructure in America and not involvement over there. At the same time, it’s a complicated question, and we’re essentially taking a sledgehammer to it with this referendum. It is a delicate situation over there, one that we never should have gotten involved in the first place, and that we have made a mess of, make no mistake. And I’m not under the illusion that passing this referendum will get us out of there, or that even an immediate troop withdrawal is smartest policy move, but we need to send every message that we can that this thing has to end, and has to end as quickly as possible because this is not the way for America to spend its money and people and prestige.”

What is Missoula’s most pressing traffic problem and where should the city turn for the money to solve it?

“I think Missoula’s most pressing traffic problem is a problem of perception in large part. I think there are certain times of day when our roads are congested and it is not all times of day. And so there’s an expectation from folks that they’re going to have a very high level of service whenever they step into their car to go somewhere. And I don’t think that we can build our roads for maximum traffic, because if we do that, everything would be an elevated freeway and we would decimate our city. Roads have an impact on neighborhoods around them, and so the best way to fix that is to change the way we lay out the city. We lessen the demand upon people for the roadways and that means spreading out commercial throughout the city so that people don’t have to travel so much for shopping, maybe work as well. … It also means lessening people’s demand for using cars by improving public transit and creating infrastructure for walking and biking that’s accessible and not intimidating. That said, we obviously have road projects that need to get done, and when we do those we need to make sure we build them with this idea that bigger is not always better, but that roads need to be tied to the land uses around them.

“The money for building roads is a huge problem and we’re going to need to figure that one out, and it may mean looking for additional sources of revenue like a local-option gas tax or a local-option sales tax. The city is very much hamstrung by what the state says it can do in order to raise money. Property-tax growth in Missoula is limited to half the rate of inflation. Now, the cost of oil and asphalt are going up greater than the rate of inflation and we have a government source of revenue that is growing by less than the rate of inflation. So we’re actually shrinking our government each year, even as our costs are outstripping the natural rate of decrease in the value of money. That’s an untenable situation, and really the solution lies in the state changing its ideas about how municipalities can fund themselves. And we need the national government to make a renewed commitment to infrastructure and cities across the country.”

Should the city encourage or discourage more housing in existing city neighborhoods? Why or why not?

“The solutions are going to be different in different parts of the city. By and large, I favor growing within the area that is now developed. I don’t think we should be tearing up green fields to put in new housing when it can be avoided. That said, people are very attached to the character of their neighborhoods, and so when you say to them we are going to build twice as many houses here as are here right now, they get really angry about that. It creates a lot of animosity and hostility to change, but the fact is, the zoning in most of Missoula is already denser than what is built on that zone. So there is a difference between development interests that a property owner has and what’s actually built. So when the person builds to the interest that’s allowed by the law that creates this anger because people’s expectations are formed by what they see rather than what the law is. This is going to be a very tough question and one that we’re going to have to work out in this development and zoning ordinance rewrite that’s coming up right now. … I prefer growing within the city limits, but it will take attention to design and attention to the character of existing neighborhoods to do that properly.”

Should the city limit the number of unrelated people who may share a house?

“No, and I’m pretty sure that’s illegal anyway. I think that was a mean-spirited thing to do. That said, some of you college students need to clean up your living conditions a little bit. I like my street, and there are college students who live on my street, and we all get along with one another, but there are some houses down in the U-district that really are pretty nasty. There’s a residential safety and standards subcommittee that’s meeting right now, and I don’t really know what they’re up to, but I know they’re trying to work on ways to regulate on the quality of housing, specifically that kind of absentee landlord, student-occupied housing. I’m a renter, but my landlady lives upstairs and I live downstairs, and there’s never any question that I’m going to rampage through her property because she’s paying attention. One of the things we can do is encourage these kinds of accessory dwelling units where the landlord is actually living on the property. That becomes a self-regulating situation. And that’s something we can do in the zoning ordinance: Make those accessory dwelling units a better possibility. But it’s also the way to do infill smartly because if you have people building on lands that they own and they continue to occupy, they’re going to do it with greater attention to good design than if they are from far away and don’t have to look at what they’ve done or live with the consequences of it.”

What specific problems in your ward would you like to see solved?

“The Rattlesnake essentially has two exits, and they are both crossed by train tracks that are heavily used. So there could potentially be a chemical spill that would not allow people to exit, or there could easily be a wildfire. If you look at the timber on Mount Jumbo, some of those nooks and crannies are ready to go whenever. So we need to be prepared for an emergency in the Rattlesnake, and the fire department’s plan for a disaster does not include getting people out of the Rattlesnake. And that’s not what we want anyway. We don’t want people all rushing to the exits. They need to go to the valley floor, they need to shelter in-place, and it takes being prepared to do this and I would really like to work over the next four years on a good emergency preparedness plan in the Rattlesnake. That just means getting the supplies that people are going to need to shelter in-place there. You can tell people you need to be prepared to live for 72 hours off of what’s in your home, but that’s not going to make it so. And so this is really a responsibility of the city to have the resources in place so that people that need to get out of their homes can get out of their homes and be safe and cared for during the time of a disaster. And it’s something that’s going to be faced by other parts of the city. Grant Creek, Miller Creek, these are all similarly closed drainages. If we do this well in the Rattlesnake, we can expand the program to include those areas.”