Forests_green_space

57:22 What is your position on tax increases? - Thank you. Yeah, the 1% permissible tax that we're talking about here, it's really one of the only mechanisms that the state gives us to bring in money for our county. And we haven't taken that a lot and that's why we're running in a deficit. And so, as I was meeting with our current counselor earlier this morning, I was told that that could equate to about five to six dollars a year per household. That's not too much, in my opinion. Does it, is it great? No. But that's less than what inflation is driving right now. And we have to make sure that we have our service levels to the places that people actually want. And if we have to keep cutting things, then the services that everyone is expecting us to provide won't be there. We, it was mentioned earlier that there's a 2.5% budget reduction. You know, we can't keep reducing and reducing and reducing

58:20 because the expectations are there, everyone's gonna have that we're gonna maintain the parks. We're gonna maintain our roads. We're gonna provide other services like safety with the police and everything and the sheriffs. And we can't do that if we keep cutting. Thank you. candidate Belcott, what approach should the county take to regulating personal fireworks use? Is there a better alternative to use for community celebrations? Well, I think we're already doing a lot of education in this community. I know that TNT has come to the council multiple times to talk about the bucket parade, that they provide education. They just did an educational workshop up in Longview, Washington recently. I don't think that we need to be taking a heavy hand and completely reducing fireworks or cutting them all together. I think it needs to be public education and safety as the priority.

59:16 We already have pretty extreme limitations on fireworks where we only let them be sold a few days a year. We used to have the biggest fireworks display West of the Mississippi for decades and that was eliminated after COVID. If that were to come back, I'm sure you would see a large reduction in fireworks happening in the neighborhoods, which would make things probably even a lot better that way as well. Thank you. - Thank you. - Can I just send yolly? - Yes, fireworks. Well, I love fireworks. They are fun, they're entertaining, but I also just talked to a person in my community that's left for the week because they can't handle it and their pets can't handle it. So this is a balancing issue with all of that. Enforcement is difficult. I heard fireworks going off three days ago, like the day they were sold, I heard them going off. It would be great if we could just say, hey, we're all gonna set them off on this one day

1:00:14 and people can learn to deal with it a little bit easier. But when they keep going off four or five days later and people are trying to get to work, it is extremely difficult. I think we need to find the funding. I think it was 2019, actually pre-COVID when the Fort's show went away and we need to bring that back. We need to maybe work on having a drone show available for people that want that instead of just the big loud noises. We have wonderful places across the county that we can partner with to have lots of different shows and things and by allowing those to happen, we can reduce the stuff going on in our individual communities. - Thank you. Candidate Pittione, do you want me to read that again? - No, that's fine. I think that I have a lot of overlap with the prior to answer and the fireworks issue 'cause the fundamental truth is the community is pretty split on this issue, right? You have those that really like it. You have those that are deeply affected by it, that are deeply affected by it,

1:01:13 whether it's they have PTSD or animals or living out in an area where there's horses around that don't, we have 35,000 horses in this county. That's not very much fun for them either. So there's really strong feelings on both sides of that issue. And I think in government, you have to be really careful when you navigate issues where there are some pretty hard passions on both sides and they probably are a little bit more increasing, especially when you have a 250-year anniversary coming up. I also don't disagree with the idea raised by Michelle that it may be better to have one large, very well-managed kind of display rather than putting the pressure on individual expressions. Thanks. - Thank you. Candidate Zingale, county government faces limits on revenue growth while demand for services continue to increase. How would you prioritize spending

1:02:12 when funding needs exceed available resources? - Thank you, yes. There's a lot of things that we need to prioritize. Right now, as I was doing my homework for this, I was informed that 75% of all of our costs go towards law and justice right now. That's a large chunk. That means that leaves 25% for roads, parks, housing, all the other things. And so what I hear every day is, we need to make sure our roads are taken care of. They're like, John, I'm one pothole away from a car payment and a repair that I can't make. We need to make sure that that's done. We love our parks. We wanna maintain them because that's some of the thing that makes Clark County what it is. Our open spaces, that's what brings people here. Like I said, I'm outside with my kids every single day in those spaces. We need to prioritize that because if we neglect it,

1:03:09 then we're making, as Councilor Young said, a place that we don't wanna live and we don't want that. So roads, parks, public safety, housing, those need to be our priorities. - Thank you. Candidate Patione, county government faces limits on revenue growth while demand for services continues to increase. How would you prioritize spending when funding needs exceed available resources? - Well, I think that there's really two things for me. One is I think it's just important to be really upfront with voters that these choices are gonna be very difficult and to have priorities when you have such a constrained funding structure because the simple truth is if you increase or prioritize funding for area A, you're gonna have to cut area B even deeper when you're already in a cut environment. So that's the first piece is to just be honest about those dynamics. The second piece is then how do you make those choices?