Alex White for City Council
Many of you know me as the Green Party
of Rochester Candidate, but my work for our city hasn’t been limited to just
those campaigns. The city has implemented many of my ideas, from expanded
plastic recycling to a Cooperative business initiative. I proposed Police Body
Cameras in 2013, and when my proposal was approved I worked with United
Christian Leadership Ministries (UCLM) to get them issued to RPS officers. I
serve as a member of the Coalition for Police Reform, putting forward effective
policies and providing oversight for the program. In 2015, when the budget for
the Office of Adults & Careers Education Services was cut, I worked to
restore funding and save this crucial program, which helps high school dropouts
get the training they need to enter careers to support themselves and their
families. Meanwhile I continue to help numerous small businesses navigate
permit and ticketing issues with the city to keep Rochester working.
Over the last few decades, Rochester
has faced far more than its fair share of problems. Perhaps most
troublesome is poverty and for the last 20 years poverty in Rochester has
increased by half a percentage point every year. Presently more than a third of
all Rochester residents live in poverty. On average, black residents earn
75 cents to every white resident’s dollar, and white residents hold nine times
more wealth than black residents. Meanwhile, our city council continues to
support the mayor plan of giving millions of dollars in loans to already rich
developers who build overpriced housing, financially inaccessible to most city
residents.
Education is supposedly the
“great equalizer” in the United States, but Rochester schools are the worst in
the state, and our city council insists they should be able to improve this with
the same tax revenue they had access to in 2004, irrespective of
inflation and a decade and a half of unrestrained depreciation. Our
infrastructure is unacceptably unsupported; our roads are riddled with
potholes, our public transportation is insufficient, we lack necessary access
to parking and bike lanes, and yet we continue to cut funds for road repair and
improvement. Our mayor claims crime is at a 39 year low but a black teenager is
still more likely to die of a gunshot than all other cause of death. In many
neighborhoods residents are too scared to go outside at night. Meanwhile, our City Council Vice President,
the longest serving council member, is going to jail.
For too long we have made the bar too
low for our elected officials, and yet they still manage to fall short.
It is time for Rochester to expect more out of our representatives. It is
time to support a truly progressive candidate, the candidate who has been
working tirelessly on the issues that actually matter in Rochester, a leader
with integrity, who is not linked to the past culture of corruption on our city
council. It is time for Rochester’s Green New Deal. It is time for Alex White
for City Council, and I look forward to your support as we work toward
improving our shared home.
