BOISE, Idaho — Only months into her term as Boise mayor, Lauren McLean faced tough decisions presented by the coronavirus pandemic.
Wednesday night Mclean addressed the city of Boise during a virtual State of the City address. During her speech, McLean addressed several topics including the coronavirus pandemic, affordable housing, and pursuing green energy.
McLean sat down with KTVB reporter Joe Parris on Thursday to answer questions about her address and to answer critics that went as far as trying to recall her from office.
You can watch the full interview in the YouTube player below:
A key in McLean's address, a tone of hope and optimism for Boise.
Joe Parris: I saw comments after your speech that. How can I be as a person in Boise, how can I be optimistic when I've lost my job this year? Yeah, my family's trying to make ends meet. It is not good for me as a citizen of Boise and it's encouraging to see the mayor's optimistic but to the people that are still struggling and having as hard as in time now as they were earlier this year. Yeah. How can they be optimistic?
Boise Mayor Lauren McLean: And it is hard I mean people lost their jobs that are cost of living is increasing and even before the pandemic this was a problem. And now, even more so people are really struggling and then we're juggling kids at home, all of these different things that none of us should have to deal with or address. And I would say to those in our community that are hurting so much that I just want them to know that I'm thinking about them on a daily basis that we're trying to figure out how we support small businesses, what we can do for our residents to ease the burdens that we all have right now, and that there's so many people and organizations in this community that are building partnerships trying to do that.
Parris: You as a leader, the mayor of Boise, you were ahead of the curve in terms of the state level, closing businesses, taking big steps. And at the time, people said, "Mayor McLean's going too far, she shut my business she cost my family, money. Now I don't know if I'll be able to have a successful business eight months from now." Looking back on March and April, when those really the toughest decisions were made, do you regret any of those decisions or would you do it again the same?
McLean: You know somebody said to me, as we were making the decisions that if I made them at the right time, then there wouldn't be as many people in the hospital, and people would say, why'd you do this, if I made it too late, people would say, "Why didn't you do this?" And so it was, you know, recognizing that they were tough decisions. And we believe that we made the right call, the governor made the right call. And it had real impacts on many, many people, but by taking those steps, early, we prevented at a time we weren't ready [for] a large, large spike. And at the end of the day, we knew that we had to do that if we wanted to recover economically in the long run and there were many businesses throughout the city that were asking us to take action because they were seeing already, and the impacts of it people's concerns about the virus were having on their businesses.
Parris: With a lot of your decisions, you had very loud critics, there was a campaign to recall you that has been suspended. A major voice and that was, "She [McLean] doesn't want to be part of our Boise, she's trying to change Boise, She wants to make this Portland or Austin, and she doesn't represent us." Some people have said you have a socialist agenda. They took items in your report and said she wants to do these things, even though they were just recommendations. But how do you assure the people that are so critical of you to the point where they wanted you out of office that you represent them, and that you're listening to them, and that you're here to, I guess, take their thoughts into account in forming the city?
McLean: I am here because the public elected me to protect this place that we all deeply love. And this is home for so many from so many places, and there's nothing other than Boise, in terms of who we are and what we're focused on. And every day, and my record the last nine months shows it, we're thinking about how we address the very real economic issues, the need for affordable housing, the importance in the imperative of trying to build an economy as we switch to clean energy and protecting the soul of this place that we love so much. And I just encourage everyone to not listen to the some voices but to look at the progress we've made the steps we've taken our budget, and the priorities that we've shown are clear.
Parris: No secret there's a lot of people that are from outside of Idaho, want to move to Boise. it's an attractive city, it's more affordable than other beautiful cities across the country. How do you balance the influx of people who quite frankly have more money than a lot of Idahoans? You keep Boiseians in their homes but also welcome all these new people to the community?
McLean: These are the pressures that as our city grows we're going to continue to face. And it's why so many of our residents are struggling to keep up with rent, to address rising property tax values that impact their mortgage. And so, first off, this year we decided not to take the 3% we did take growth in terms of property tax revenue because we don't want people that are already here to have to pay more for the people that are coming. And so, we recognize that our decisions around property tax and tightening our belts would have an impact a positive impact on residents' property tax bills. We are advancing the housing Land Trust, we will have this fall and into the winter housing affordability ordinance for the public to weigh in on. And then we're also looking at a zoning rewrite to make sure that we are able to allow enough housing in our community to be built to meet the demand that exists.
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