For those of y’all who want more details on her positions but don’t want to put in the work:
How would Forte add to the city's response to COVID?
The councillor-elect wants the City to play a bigger part in COVID responses beyond enforcing rules and handing out masks. She mentioned making the city a bigger part of contact tracing and COVID tests so that people feel more confident about returning to local businesses.
Forte supports 'affordable housing' -but what does that look like?
She also wants to bring “transparency into [the] process” of allocating bond-based funds for affordable housing. What she meant by “transparency” wasn’t clear, but she did say she’s interested in putting more of a spotlight on low-income housing and workforce housing (e.g. firefighters, teachers), as well as bringing rental units up to “a more livable state” and increasing first-time homeownership.
She’s also passionate about helping women- and minority-owned businesses being a competitive option for city-commissioned work such as public housing.
Between these positions and her push for improved public transit and careful business re-activation, it’s clear that she’s not anti-development. But her views are also more nuanced than just saying she’s “pro-building-more-cool-stuff” (but then again, when was the world ever that black-and-white?).
About that vision of improved public transit...
Forte also supports the idea of more frequent, organized public transit. She lamented how GoRaleigh’s “really large city buses that […] are practically empty”, and wants to make buses a more compelling alternative to driving. She suggested “bringing in smaller buses that run as feeders [for] large buses” and “see how we can make [our buses] more efficient […] so that there’s not as much of a wait time” as a start -though I got a general impression she hasn’t been following the Wake Transit Plan too closely.
She also has interesting ideas about police accountability in Raleigh.
Forte also wants to take advantage of her experience as a criminal defense attorney to establish an ombudsman’s office. Ombudsmen’s offices let police officers (and other city employees) have an anonymous, confidential way to report and investigate misconduct issues like police misconduct and violence. Forte has personal experience being an ombud, so she sounds like she knows the best practices for putting this into practice.
She’s also interested in granting the Police Oversight Board subpoena powers for police misconduct investigations, but understands that she’d have to work with the City Attorney and General Assembly representatives. Forte is keen on bringing out the big guns for police reform, but she cautioned that “it’s not one of those things I want to say ‘yes, absolutely, this is what we’re going to do’”. She has a sense of what the City can do and where she knows she’d have to work with state officials. “We don’t want to get people’s hopes up, and overpromise and underdeliver.”
Her vision for the future of Raleigh is really concise, salient, yet sexy:
I’m glad the Council picked her, too, since it sounds to me like she knows how to find the right perspectives to make that happen.