Candidate Questionnaire: Jillian Johnson, Durham City Council

Name as it appears on the ballot: Jillian Johnson

Age: 38

Party affiliation: Democrat

Campaign website: jillianfordurham.com

Occupation & employer: incumbent council member

Years lived in Durham: 20

1) Given the direction of Durham government, would you say things are on the right course? If not, for what specific changes will you advocate if elected?

I believe Durham is on the right course. In the four years that I’ve been on City Council, we’ve advanced key policy priorities to improve the lives of Durham residents. The city’s new strategic plan is a bold blueprint for the creation of a community where everyone can thrive. We’ve built a more inclusive democracy by engaging over 10,000 residents in participatory budgeting, recruiting a more diverse body of residents to our city boards and commissions, and implementing a comprehensive language access plan to ensure that we can adequately serve Spanish-speaking residents. We’ve invested in workforce and economic development initiatives to bring good, living wage jobs to Durham and bring sustainable development to disinvested communities. We’ve more than doubled our investment in affordable housing and have proposed an ambitious $160M 5-year housing plan, and we will be seeking additional funding for that plan with a $95M housing bond that will be on the ballot this fall. We’ve hired a new police chief who has committed to focus resources on fighting violent crime, reducing drug arrests and traffic stops, expanding access to U-Visas, and expanding misdemeanor diversion. We’ve adopted a resolution calling for a full transition to clean, renewable energy in city operations and are taking aggressive steps to meet that goal.

It’s also true that we need to do more. Too many of our residents are not benefiting from Durham’s development and newfound prosperity. Our income inequality, child poverty, and eviction rates continue to be high. After two years of low crime rates, we saw a spike in violent crime in the first half of 2019 that’s concerning to many residents. We continue to have a severe shortage of affordable housing, especially housing that’s affordable to our lowest income residents. Our public housing communities are in need of repairs and renovations. Our transit system needs to be expanded and strengthened, and we need a regional transit solution as well. If re-elected, I will continue to work hard to address these issues and the myriad other issues our community faces.

2) Please identify the three most pressing issues you believe the city faces and how you believe the city should address them.

I believe the most important issue facing Durham today is access to affordable housing. As Durham has grown and developed, especially in the downtown core, we’ve seen a huge increase in rents and home prices in downtown neighborhoods. These changes have resulted in low-income people and people of color being displaced from these areas. I enthusiastically support the $95M affordable housing bond that will be on the ballot this fall, and if re-elected, I will ensure that this funding is used to its best and highest impact to save the public housing and increase the amount of affordable housing in our community. Because our affordable housing crisis is in tandem with a shortage in housing overall, I also support efforts to increase housing density in the urban tier, while still preserving quality of life in urban tier neighborhoods. These efforts include allowing duplexes, larger accessory dwelling units (ADU’s), and smaller homes on smaller lots through implementation of the “Expanding Housing Choices” initiative and developing a new comprehensive plan.

Here are a few of the other proposals the city should implement to help end our affordable housing crisis:

• Work with local Durham financial institutions to create a loan program that will allow families to develop their own accessory dwelling units.
• Maximize the use of federal housing tax credits to make sure that new affordable homes are created using these credits each year.
• Lobby for legislation at the state level to allow progressive property taxation, inclusionary zoning, and rent control.
• Increase the amount of permanent supportive housing within the city of Durham for those who have disabilities and are chronically without housing.
• Create more homeownership opportunities for low income Durham residents through a citywide down payment assistance program.
• Expand outreach to elderly, disabled and low income homeowners in the city of Durham to make sure that eligible residents are taking advantage of state property tax relief programs.
• Expand emergency rental assistance so that more tenants can stay in their homes.
• Continue to combat Durham’s eviction crisis by expanding city funding for legal services for tenants facing eviction.

We also need to focus significant energy on economic inclusion. In our recent strategic plan rewrite, the city’s administration announced a focus on “shared prosperity.” Recent growth in Durham has been substantial, but very uneven. I’m excited to support the city’s Built2Last economic development plan, which includes developing a grant & loan fund to support minority businesses. We also continue to lobby at the state level for an increase in the minimum wage and to rescind the ban on public employee collective bargaining, allowing unions to bargain for better contracts for their members. In addition, I’m excited about the city’s involvement with the SEEDS fellowship, a joint program between the National League of Cities and the Democracy at Work Institute to train staff in four cities to help convert legacy businesses to cooperative ownership.

Here are a few of the other proposals in my platform to expand economic inclusion and promote shared prosperity:

• Continue our existing partnership with Downtown Durham Inc. and the Durham Chamber of Commerce to support the recruitment of minority and women-owned businesses to downtown Durham.
• Work with other local governments, Durham Public Schools, community organizations, and our local business community, continue to expand the Durham YouthWork Summer Internship Program.
• Refocus existing city government efforts toward economic inclusion around racial equity within the new Department of Equity and Inclusion. Enhance the city’s current strategy for communicating the availability of contracting opportunities to minority and women-owned businesses to include information regarding available educational and technical assistance programs to help such businesses compete and win those contracting opportunities.
• Create a system of support within city government for minority and women-owned subcontractors. Hold all city departments accountable for demonstrating progress towards quantifiable goals for utilization of historically underutilized businesses.
• Expand current pilot program using jobs within city government as transitional employment opportunities for Durham residents looking for work after returning home from jail or prison.
• Support current grant-funded program to support Durham residents currently in jail or prison who are 45-60 days away from release with job training to facilitate a smooth transition when they return to Durham.
• Require applicants for significant City economic incentives to complete an equitable development scorecard which details the benefits to the community that will flow from the city’s investment, i.e., local and racially diverse hiring, living wages, partnerships with local historically underutilized businesses, and measures to ensure environmental sustainability.

Finally, we need to ensure that everyone in our community is safe — from community violence, the actions of state actors like ICE, natural/human disasters, and the unnecessary collateral consequences of involvement in the criminal legal system. We are fortunate to have a police chief, sheriff, DA, and judges who are focusing their collective efforts on violent crime, refusing to cooperate with ICE, and working toward broad criminal justice reform. We should continue to support this focus and this effort in our city and county institutions. We should also expand efforts to prevent crime, intervene in situations where people are likely to become victims or perpetrators of violence, and provide comprehensive re-entry services to residents who are returning home to Durham from jail or prison. Here are some additional proposals I support to fight violent crime and promote broad reform in our local criminal justice system:

• Partner with Durham County to create a crisis first-responders program separate from the police department or Sheriff’s office.
• Expand existing pre-arrest diversion program to include misdemeanor offenders regardless of age for nearly all first- and second-time offenders.
• Ensure that all Durham police officers are trained in crisis intervention techniques.

• Keep families safe from acts of domestic violence by expanding our robust and effective partnership with the Sheriff, District Attorney, Durham Crisis Response Center and Legal Aid of North Carolina to create a comprehensive domestic violence support system. 
• Invest in violence prevention and “violence interrupter” programs with existing ties to the community to directly engage residents who are most likely to be victims or perpetrators of violence.
• Drastically reduce or eliminate traffic stop enforcement actions for driving without a license and vehicle equipment violations such as expired registration or broken taillight.
• Partner with members of the Durham community to develop and fund additional strategies to promote harm reduction and community safety separate and apart from law enforcement.
• Lobby for changes in state law to decriminalize marijuana use.

3) What in your record as a public official or other experience demonstrates your ability to be effective as a member of the city council and as an advocate for the issues that you believe are important?

In my four years as a city council member, I have been effective at building coalitions with council members and community organizations to successfully implement progressive public policy. Coalitions and community advocacy are key to getting things done and to creating a healthy and vibrant democratic process. An example of my experience and success with advocating successfully for a city policy is my advocacy to bring participatory budgeting (PB) to Durham.

I first learned about PB shortly before I ran for office in 2015. I was excited by the opportunity to broaden access to our democracy and encourage greater civic participation by getting more residents involved in making budget decisions. The idea was enthusiastically supported by community leaders and groups who were interested in building more democratic inclusion in Durham, but many in the community had never heard of PB. In order to ensure that I could advocate effectively, I attended a full-day PB implementation training in the summer of 2016. The training and conversations with interested community members inspired me to make a strong effort to bring PB to Durham in the upcoming budget year.

In the fall of 2016, I began to have conversations with council members and the broader community about PB. I met with 10+ community organizations to introduce them to PB and answer questions from their members and leaders. I had one-on-one conversations with each council member, the mayor, the city budget director, and the city manager about my hopes and goals for a successful PB program. I also worked closely with national PB consultants and was able to bring both a training session and film screening about PB to Durham in 2016 and 2017. Though some council members were interested in the idea and supportive of a PB pilot, I was unable to get a majority of council members to agree to include funding for PB in the 2017-2018 council budget, which we approved in June of 2017.

After new council members were sworn in in December of 2017, I continued to advocate for PB with each of them, as well as the returning council members and the Mayor. With the support of new council members, the program was likely to be approved, but there were still a lot of details to be worked out with council, staff, and community input. After successfully funding PB implementation in the 2018-2019 budget and committing to fund project implementation in the 2019-2020 budget, I served as the liaison to the PB steering committee and have had regular meetings with staff throughout implementation. Our implementation was incredibly successful, with over 500 ideas and over 10,000 voters participating in the process.

The story of how PB came to Durham highlights my ability to work with other council members to build a majority of support for a policy, engage and educate members of the community about the policy, and follow through all the way to implementation to help support the success of the work.

4) In your view, what’s the best or most important thing the city council has done in the past year? Alternatively, name a decision you believe the council got wrong or an issue you believe the city should have handled differently. Please explain your answer.

The best thing the council has done in the last year is put the $95M housing bond on the ballot. This funding is crucial to redevelop public housing, create and preserve affordable housing, and provide access to more housing opportunities for Durham residents. The housing bond is the most important thing on the ballot this year. Our five-year housing plan isn’t enough to end gentrification and displacement in Durham — in truth, we need a litany of changes at the state and federal levels to make that possible — but it will make a huge difference downtown and across Durham. I’m thankful that the council is taking this bold step forward.

5) This year, the city has seen an uptick in gun homicides compared to 2018, recently including the tragic death of a nine-year-old boy. Gun violence is obviously a multifaceted problem with no simple solutions. But, in your view, what can or should the city be doing to stem the tide of violence that it isn’t doing now?

The loss of any life is an unspeakable tragedy, and my heart goes out to families who are living with the pain of that loss. There are many things that we can be doing now to have both short and long-term impacts on violence. The city invests very little in violence prevention, intervention, and re-entry programs. I look forward to the work of a developing joint city-county public safety task force that will recommend and evaluate programs to focus on these three critical areas.

With regard to prevention, we should invest resources into diversion programs, anti-violence education, mental health first aid, and de-escalation training for residents. We should increase our investments in quality of life measures that make violence less likely, including housing, transit, parks, and youth programming. We should also develop a comprehensive domestic violence prevention program in partnership with the county and the courts. With regard to intervention, we should fund and implement comprehensive violence interrupter programs that work directly with residents who are most likely to become victims or perpetrators of violent crime. These programs can help reduce retaliatory violence and provide resources to people who are most at risk to help them take a different path. With regard to re-entry, we should continue to support the successful “Welcome Home” program developed by the city’s innovation team, expand our transitional jobs program that supports returning residents, and insist that companies who come to the city for incentives are hiring people who are justice-involved.

6) In recent elections, residents have supported leaders who have embraced criminal justice reforms, including reducing or eliminating cash bail and court fines and fees. Advocacy groups have argued—in our view, rightly—for more systemic solutions to violent crime than incarceration. But some of these solutions, which aim to reshape disadvantages communities, will take time to bear fruit, whereas gun violence is causing harm right now. What do you say to residents who want more immediate answers to crime problems in their neighborhoods? In what ways can the city help them?

The city continues to provide additional police patrols in “hot-spots,” which has been shown to be an effective short-term solution for increases in crime in neighborhoods. These patrols have recently been used in gentrifying neighborhoods near downtown and in Durham Housing Authority communities. The DPD has also established community engagement units in two public housing communities, which aim to provide an increased police presence in neighborhoods that have historically experienced higher crime rates. These measures are effective in the short-term, but can not replace long-term solutions.

Many violence prevention and intervention strategies also have an immediate impact on the incidence of crime. Preventing recidivism, stopping cycles of retaliatory violence, and helping people learn to de-escalate conflicts will make communities more safe immediately. Durham County is doing some of this work now through the public health department, but more needs to be done and the city should be a stronger partner in this work.

The longer-term efforts to improve access to resources and opportunity in disinvested neighborhoods will augment the effects of these more immediate strategic interventions.

7) Earlier this year, the council declined the police chief’s request for additional officers. Do you believe this was a wise decision? Why or why not?

I voted against adding additional police officers to the DPD and I believe that was the correct decision. Most of our city departments could use more staff and more resources, and we are required each year to measure their requests against each other and determine how to spend our finite resources. Our city’s investment in policing is adequate, and it increases each year due to raises for staff and increasing overhead costs. Over the last three years we have added 36 police officers and funded take-home cars, bonuses, and raises. We already employ more police officers per capita than most cities our size. Police are able to respond to calls in a timely manner, successfully investigate crimes at higher rates than other departments, and engage in significant community activities as well. Like most communities in the US, we invest far more in law enforcement than we do in crime prevention, intervention, and re-entry. I believe we should focus on funding efforts which are proven to have a long-term impact on violence.

8) This year, the Durham-Orange Light Rail project collapsed over a route dispute with Duke University and other complications. Tell us how you envision what Durham’s approach to public transportation and mass transit should look like going forward. Where should the city focus its resources?

Transit is a critical priority and a growing need in our community as Durham continues to increase in population and the impacts of climate change grow. I support continuing to subsidize transit in Durham with tax dollars so that we can keep fares at $1 and provide free bus passes to youth, seniors, and other groups in need. It’s important that we build a system where transit is available to those who need it most and also a transportation option of choice for those who have access to personal cars. The city is investing additional funding in transit this year and improving service on our most popular routes. We’re also in a position to invest some of the transit tax funding that was allocated to light rail in expansions to our local bus system. We can expand routes, add routes, and provide more frequent service in Durham with this funding. We’re also working to make taking transit easier and more comfortable by building more bus shelters, and making our transit system more sustainable by investing in electric busses.

We still need a regional transit plan, which the ½ cent transit sales tax is intended to fund. I’m looking forward to hearing from GoTriangle and city staff about their proposed alternative to light rail in about a year. We also still have the plan to build a commuter rail system connecting us to Raleigh, which will alleviate traffic in the I-40 corridor as well.

9) Much of the city’s affordable housing strategy has been planned in conjunction with light rail, and as recently as last year, Durham Housing Authority CEO Anthony Scott called light rail “critical” to his agency’s goals for low-income housing. In what ways does light rail’s demise affect the city’s strategy? How should the city alter its approach, if at all?

City & DHA staff were hopeful that light rail would facilitate a planning strategy to encourage transit-oriented dense development around light rail stations. We believed that these stations, especially those that are downtown, would augment the DHA’s redevelopment strategy by increasing the value of their downtown land and enhancing the opportunities for DHA residents in the downtown core to reach jobs via transit. We also set a goal of ensuring that 15% of the housing within the station areas was affordable at 60% of the area median income (AMI).

The demise of light rail will certainly affect our strategy, but we need the revised regional transit plan from our staff to determine exactly how. After this planning process, we’ll be in a better position to judge whether the existing light rail corridor can be repurposed as a bus corridor, which we could use to meet the same transit-oriented development goals as the light rail (though quite likely at a lower residential density). It’s very possible that those communities are still a good place to target our efforts to increase density and ensure affordability in the future.

10) In November, Durham will ask residents to vote on a $95 million bond to support affordable housing, a key part of a larger strategy to build or preserve more than twenty-five hundred affordable units and move at least seventeen hundred homeless households into housing, as well as create new homeownership opportunities and help those facing eviction. We’d like to ask a few questions about the bond:

·      Do you support the bond, including the property tax hike that will be required to implement it?

Yes, I support the bond.

·      If you support the bond, what would be your argument to homeowners who have seen their property taxes rise over the last several years for why they should support the bond? How will it benefit them? Why is this bond so vital?

First, affordable housing is a critical need in our community. The same market forces that are causing property taxes to rise are causing renters, who are even more vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of the market, to be displaced from downtown neighborhoods. Second, the cost is relatively small while the impact is large. The average homeowner will see an increase of about $37 year as a result of the bond, and the $95M generated will allow us to have an incredible impact. Third, this is an important opportunity for us to take collective action to have an impact on a growing problem that we’re all deeply concerned about. It’s not enough for us to worry and despair about the direction our city it headed. It’s up to us to intervene in a big way. Finally, we’re working on a tax relief program for low-income long-term residents, as well as increasing outreach about the tax abatement programs that are available through the state. This will ease the burden on those who are most vulnerable.

·      About $60 million of the bond would go to the DHA to redevelop its downtown properties, a project that is already in motion. Tell us how you’d like to see the city spend the rest? In what ways can the city promote affordable housing most effectively?

A proposal for how to spend the remaining $100M of the total city funding that will be dedicated to affordable housing over the next five years is available online on the community development department’s website. I support this plan and the proposed funding of multi-family construction, multi-family preservation, stabilization, renovation and rehab, homeless services, eviction diversion, landlord education, homeownership opportunities, and more. The image below shows the current proposed allocation of funding for the entire plan. It has been revised after consultation with interested community members and groups.

11) Given the influx of people and money Durham has seen in recent years, gentrification has become a major concern, in East Durham but also in other neighborhoods close to downtown. In what ways can or should the city intervene?

The best way for our city to help stop displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods, because it is one of the few ways that the North Carolina General Assembly allows us to legally intervene, is to directly provide and subsidize affordable housing. As the neighborhoods around downtown are gentrifying most quickly, we should invest in those neighborhoods quickly as well. North Carolina bans many of the tools that have been effective interventions in other cities – rent control, inclusionary zoning, and various property tax strategies, to name a few. We should also continue to lobby at the state level for changes in these laws, which would give localities more authority to implement policies to affect gentrification and the direction of the housing market overall. I also believe it will be most effective for us to advocate with the support of other cities in NC for these changes and other changes to state preemption laws. As co-chair of the NC chapter of Local Progress, I’ve been working to build relationships and coalitions with elected officials around the state toward achieving these goals for all NC residents.

12) Durham’s downtown is ringed by low-density neighborhoods, which has contributed to rising home values in the urban core. Earlier this year, the city proposed a plan called Expanded Housing Choices, which would allow for more—and more kinds—of housing near downtown. It met with pushback and has been delayed for months. (EHC is scheduled to come back before the council on September 3.) Disputes that seem to turn on the question of density vs. neighborhood protection seem to be emerging all over the country, including in Raleigh. What are your thoughts on the city’s approach to EHC? Is it adequately considering the desires of neighborhoods? Is it being aggressive enough in adding density in the urban core? Is it handling the situation just right?

I think the EHC struck an appropriate balance between increasing density to accommodate our growing population and being sensitive to the existing context in the neighborhoods that surround downtown. We understand that as growth increases we need to add more housing, and failing to do this will increase price appreciation and market pressure on our current housing stock. By allowing duplexes, ADU’s, and smaller houses on smaller lots, the EHC promotes context-sensitive density and infill development that is more environmentally sustainable and helps create walkable, bikeable neighborhoods.

There was not a consensus among neighborhood representatives about whether EHC would be beneficial or detrimental. The city and the planning department held numerous public events, neighborhood meetings, and public hearings to ensure that anyone on either side of the issue had the opportunity to be heard. Like most zoning cases we face, we had strong proponents and strong opponents speak to us on this issue.

We won’t know whether we’re handling the situation “just right” until we review the data from the first few years of implementation of these new zoning rules. The EHC provisions were designed to add a modest number of homes in the urban tier each year, and we’ll soon have data to see whether or not we’re hitting those targets. We’ll be able to adjust rules to allow either more or less flexibility, or keep things the same, depending on what we see as these new policies are implemented. I’m more hopeful about the possibility for larger ADU’s and financing programs for homeowners to get capital to build them.

13) As of 2017, nearly half of Durham residents living in poverty were black. The city’s overall economy has improved markedly over the last two decades. What are your ideas for making its renaissance more equitable?

Economic inequality and the racial wealth gap continue to plague our community and cities all over the country. I’m excited to support the city’s Office of Economic & Workforce Development’s Built2Last initiative, which focuses on creating economic opportunity and shared prosperity throughout Durham. This initiative will focus on minority-owned businesses and create a debt and equity fund to help capitalize small businesses, provide technical support to new businesses, and support the city’s efforts to increase purchasing and service contracts with minority-owned businesses. We’re also working with community partners to increase the number of students in our summer youth jobs program to 1,000 over the next few years, and this program primarily serves Black youth.

I’m also very supportive of cooperatively-owned businesses, and have advocated for the city to take a larger role in helping people of color start and run employee-owned companies. These companies allow workers to have an ownership stake in the company, broadening the opportunity for them to build wealth. The city is currently participating in the SEEDS fellowship, which is a program that trains city staff to help legacy businesses convert to cooperative ownership. I hope we can continue to support cooperative development as part of a package of community development tools.

The city has also recently re-tooled our Office of Equal Opportunity/Equity Assurance to the Office of Equity and Inclusion. Though their mission is broader than economic equity, they will continue to have a significant focus on Durham’s contracting and purchasing efforts to ensure that minority-owned businesses are preferenced for public dollars.

14) Because of state law, municipalities have a number of restrictions placed on them by the legislature: they can’t, for instance, be a sanctuary city, impose a citywide minimum wage, enact an antidiscrimination ordinance that includes LGBTQ residents, or enforce inclusionary zoning. Under what circumstances should elected officials push back against the legislature?

I believe that in cases where a reasonable legal argument can be made against a preemption policy by our state legislature, it would be reasonable for a city to push back against this policy both legislatively and legally. Ideally this work could be done in cooperation with other cities across the state through the Local Progress network or other networks of elected officials who are concerned about the eroding of local control and local democracy.

An opportunity to do just that is approaching with the expiration of HB 142 in December of next year. A reasonable legal argument can be made that by allowing this law to expire, it is the intent of the NCGA to allow cities to pass comprehensive non-discrimination legislation protecting people on the basis of gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation, in addition to the existing protected classes. I support the city moving forward with such an ordinance under these circumstances and expect that doing so in cooperation with other cities across the state would create a powerful opportunity for us to expand the civil rights of NC’s residents.

15) If there are other issues you want to discuss, please do so here.

My complete platform, developed jointly with Javiera Caballero & Charlie Reece, is available online at jillianfordurham.com/platform.