Snapshot: Helene Schneider

Age: 32
Occupation: Human Resources Director, Planned Parenthood
Background: Has worked with Assemblyman Jack O’Connell, the Housing Authority, Santa Barbara Human Resources Association, Santa Barbara Woman’s Political Committee, Santa Barbara County Action Network, Building Bridges, California National Organization for Women PAC.

LD: Why do you want to be on the City Council?

HS: … I want to bring my perspective of the 30-something working person to the council on issues ranging from environmental protection and places where we can play and love where we are and try to have opportunities for people of all socioeconomic backgrounds and family-size and what not to be able to enjoy living here too. … I don’t want it to become a place for students and poor people living 20 people in a house and then retired and rich people over here and nothing in the middle.

LD: What are the priority issues for you?

HS: The biggest overarching one I think is how we deal with budget. I think the city’s done a good job in preparing for the rainy day, and the storm is a coming. It’s already gotten cloudy, it’s already rained a little bit but we don’t know what’s on the horizon. We still don’t know what’s going to happen to state, we still don’t know how the state is going to try to resolve its deficit on the backs of cities and counties and what is that going to mean to us. The city’s a service organization … all that takes money. So that’s the big picture.

LD: How do you address that?

HS: I think we obviously we need to be very careful about it, we need to be very smart, we need to be balanced, we need to fair in terms of what we do with money. I’m not someone to say absolutely no in terms of what comes across my desk. I want to ask, “OK, what’s the cost if we don’t do this?” In terms of staffing … the cost of training and turnover and what not, if we don’t do it. We can’t just freeze it and say we’re in a budget crisis because you’re going to spend money anyway.

And then it comes to safety issues and that to me is both public safety and environmental safety. I’m a housing authority commissioner, I talk about workforce housing, it’s extremely important, it is a priority, but you know what, if we don’t have a safe place to live and if our creeks are polluted and we don’t feel comfortable walking from point A to point B, nothing else really matters. That’s a huge part of what the city needs to accomplish. So it’s more broad-based.

And then the underneath it all, it’s all about how to be a good employer. The city’s a huge employer and that’s what makes the city run — the people who work for us. How do you approach so that you can recruit and retain talented, creative, motivated, hard-working staff to do all the things we want so we can make sure our creeks are clean, so we can make sure that we have people who can move the planning process forward and people aren’t gridlocked so that we can have a vibrant community of arts and festivals and you know things that bring people in to make this a vibrant community, so we can house people, all the things, so the potholes are filled, so the trees are trimmed.

LD: What about your views on spending?

HS: I think we need to balance the budget any chance we get. When times are good we need to put money away into reserves because times won’t always be good, and when times are bad it’s okay to dip into reserves in order to soften the blow. And I think the city’s approach they’re taking to the budget is a smart one in that they’re not doing a lot of layoffs, they are reducing the size and scope of the number of employees through attrition.

At some point I’d be careful and concerned about how many employees leave. … Firefighters are a great example. I met with them … and one of the men explained how he had just finished a 23-day stint ... I know I wouldn’t want my house on fire on his 22nd day and part of that is because of the staffing issues.

… I think we need to ask just because something was done or has been structured a certain way in the past and it’s always been done that way doesn’t mean that it has to be done that way from now forward. Times have changed and there’re more people here and technology is different, and what are things we can do that can help people who work here and reduce costs at the same time.

LD: How would you attack the problem of jobs/housing balance in our town?

HS: Well, again that deals with the gap of workforce housing opportunities here. So in planning in a way to still protect our open space, keep our creeks and oceans clean and all that and look at mixed use projects along the downtown core, along transportation corridors, along with working with larger employers and trying to partner with them. … It’s still essential to have good paying jobs here. There are things that we can do to ensure those good paying jobs.

We still want, everything from our own city staffing, public safety and public works, cleaning our creeks, they’re all essential things. I’d like to see if the housing authority or other organizations are going to do workforce housing projects, to look at our critical workforce here. It’s crazy that our healthcare professionals and our teachers and fire, police … I mean they make good money and aren’t able to live where they work. I think the community loses. And administrative staff, they’re the ones that keep things going.

LD: What about neighborhood compatibility?

HS: That’s essential, absolutely. First I think there needs to be a lot of education about what it is we’re talking about when we talk about density or when we talk about mixed use or when we talk about larger units … so that if there are disagreements, we’re disagreeing over the same thing… I think the Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance is essential because that’s a great collaborative process and we’re going to hear from people who live in these neighborhoods and look at what does it mean to be a neighborhood. … So that’s a big piece.

LD: Where does the environment factor in your values?

HS: You can have anything you want in the city, but if you don’t have both environmental and public safety, nothing else matters. People love Santa Barbara because of where it is on the planet and its environmental beauty and that’s something that we absolutely have to protect and preserve.