Monique Kaldy

Criminal Justice / Public Safety We need City resources to help our neighborhoods establish certified “FireWise” communities, both to decrease risks and insurance costs. Utility under-grounding is ultimately necessary to make Monterey safer from wildfires. We must create a plan to remove the obstacles and figure out financing and grants so we can get that done. It will not be easy due to the cost, but we can manage that by prioritizing the highest-risk neighborhoods. Once a wildfire starts, it can move to other neighborhoods, so prioritizing higher-risk areas protects us all. We owe it to ourselves to make the hard choices that could ultimately save us from a more devastating cost. Government Reform Our Neighborhood and Community Improvement Program (NCIP) representatives are a unique treasure; other cities don’t have this. As Monterey residents, we benefit from this outstanding representation by having a voice in City government. This unique approach promotes interaction of the residents, giving us all enhanced opportunities to propose improvements for our community. We must preserve and strengthen this vital lifeline between our neighborhoods and City government. The process of appointing NCIP representatives has become secretive and one-sided; we must return it to a transparent and publicly accessible process. Criminal Justice / Public Safety Supporting our public safety workers must be a priority for the City. Our firefighters are burdened with decades-old facilities and equipment. Combine this with the local restrictions on vegetation management, and our communities face unnecessary levels of risk in the event of a wildfire. We need a plan in place now to finance and update our fire services as soon as possible. Housing We need to maximize the highest and best use of our existing commercial buildings. There are many partially vacant commercial properties, these could become mixed-use buildings with housing on upper floors. Incentivizing commercial property owners to convert to mixed use or multi-family housing would improve the amount of available housing in our community, and thereby help with affordability. This will be achieved without worsening city sprawl and only moderately increasing density where it makes sense. Housing Rent “stabilization” and control will drive landlords out of Monterey. This has been well documented in other cities. When a property owner cannot make it “pencil out” to rent, that housing unit gets sold, causing rents to increase to full market rates or being occupied or redeveloped by the new owner so we have even less rental housing available. The immediate effect of rent regulation is decreased budgets for maintenance and repairs. The long-term effect is less housing and worse affordability for our community’s working families. We need to protect our renters from the consequences of restrictive rental policies.