Voter Guide: Jeremy Marley

• Website: https://www.jeremymarley.com/
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Interview Transcript:

Reporter:

Why do you want us to be a part of City Council?

Marley:

Yeah. So, Honestly, city council to me, that's, City government in general. Government in general. I've never had a want to be a part of. So, as it comes down the line, I, I had reached out to a friend, they had reached out to me in November and said, hey, are you running for mayor? And I said, no, there's no chance that I'm doing that. During that time frame, I was an instructor at the University, and, and I was looking at my, my position there and whether or not I was going to continue to move on with that, also running my business full time. And so in the summertime hit, I had decided I was going to jump back into my business full time and pretty much spend the rest of the the time focused on that. And at that same time, I got a call from a friend who had asked me if I was running for mayor, who had decided to run for mayor. And, and, he said, are you, are you interested in running for city council? And I said, no, I'm going to do my business. That's that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to focus on the business here. And, and, and then he said, well, you should definitely pay attention to what's going on in the community. And as I started to dig in to the things that were going on, it was apparent that there needed to be some changes. And, when I looked into the other candidates that were running, I wasn't sure that I saw a change, on the menu. And so I threw my head.

Reporter:

And third question, as a city council representative, what would be your main goal? So this kind of goes into what you just said.

Marley:

Yeah. So Pocatello has had basically five major issues. The top issue is transparency. People can't see what the city's doing. They don't understand why they're doing what they're doing. And they don't know where the money's going. So, you know, that's that's one of the primary things that I'm running for is because there's just, not everybody cares to see what the city's doing, but it affects everyone when you can't see. And so transparency is a big deal, and that's their their buzzwords. Every candidate's going to say transparency. They're going to say affordable housing. They're going to say higher wages. They're going to say a lot of those things. But primarily, when I look at transparency, what I see is I'm a systems person. I run a unit company. I was an IT director, and systems make a big difference in how everything functions. And, so with the city of Pocatello, where there's no transparency, where you have, resources that are kind of kind of hidden, definitely hidden and, and maybe even some, mishandling or misrepresentation of people's funds. There's a there's a lot to be said. People are wondering why are our taxes going up where everyone else is? Taxes aren't necessarily on the rise. Why is our housing where it's at and housing nationwide is going up? But they don't know why. They don't understand why their wages are so low. Why do we have the lowest wages in the state or some of the lowest wages in the state, when we have some of the higher housing? And that balance is really starting to cause a lot of problems, confusion in the public, but also, animosity between classes, even so. So there's some horrible things that are kind of happening in Pocatello, while at the same time, transparency will change a lot of that. The more that you can see, the easier it is to work through a problem. So transparency is number one. Affordable housing. That's the thing that, that people have come out with, pretty much everybody says, oh, affordable housing. That's one of the things one of our mayoral candidates running all about. I look at affordable housing and I look at subsidized housing, and to me, those are not the same thing. The the world, sometimes allows that to be the definition. And, and so they say, oh, give us housing and then give a subsidy so that we can pay for the housing, because it covers the difference. So it's affordable for the tenant. But it's not actually affordable because it's taking money out of other people's pockets in order to pay the landlord. And so there's a there's a discrepancy in that adjustment there. And, and I feel like there's a way that we can get around that or get through that. And I've been working with different, different builders, different developers, different investors to find ways to make that, more feasible. Affordable is not the same as subsidized. So that's that's the second thing. Third thing wages. Pocatello has had a, I've been saying this for about five years. They talked about a housing bubble. And that was the kind of the buzz for the last five years. But I've been saying it's not really a housing bubble. I mean, we've been seeing housing inflation. But the reality of it is that what we are seeing is the bottom falling out of a, of a wages market. So it's not like the housing bubble is going to burst because those houses, the people came in and they paid cash for them where they came in and they got good loans and they're not defaulting on them, and they're actually doing just fine on them. And so the housing costs are high, but they're probably not going to burst and collapse. And so the reality of it is that what happened was a lot of money came in from outside that inflated the market. But it left this base level of people that live in Pocatello that didn't get wages increased. And so the bottom fell out of the housing market in Pocatello. When you have that kind of thing happen, really the the solution to that is to build an equitable base where people are able to make more money and sustain a little bit more growth. And a lot of that's done through entrepreneurship. Something to the to the numbers. About 80% of real growth in a, in a small economy has to do with its entrepreneurs. And so that's actually where my focus is that I have a degree in business, I have experience starting up small businesses. I have a sound understanding of investment at that level and building equity and exchanging equity. I built a lot of networks, that train on those same things, and I see that as being the real future of development and growth and Pocatello is small businesses, entrepreneurs, equity based on ideas like when you think about equity, people often think, okay, well, financial equity, for example, people think, okay, real estate is a type of equity. An education is a type of equity. It's something that you can leverage so that you can turn a profit. And there's another type of equity. Nobody looks at Elon Musk and says, how many properties does Elon own? They look at it and say, what is Elon? What's what makes him worth this much? And the reality of it is that it's ideas and innovation, and those are types of equity that we're not really tapping into, but that we have an abundance of in Pocatello because of our university and because of the programs and things that we have as options. And then, digging into the the back end of, you know, when I started to run, I wasn't like, oh, I'm all in. I'm just going to do this and go full force and forget everything else around me for the next four months. When I started, I just, I said, I'm going to do some research. And I kind of touched on a few options of maybe I'll run and, and, and when I started to research, what I found was that I don't really think that Pocatello got, I used to think that we would have to build this scaffolding or big structure in order to make businesses come to Pocatello. But the more that I dig in, the more the people that I talked to, the more I realized that it's really probably the city management and the people that are at the head that are keeping that business from coming in. So it just getting those things out of the way will make a huge impact on solutely.

Reporter:

Alrighty. And then my, next question also kind of goes into sort of the last question. What is great about Pocatello and what do you think could be better?

Marley:

Oh my goodness. So everything about Pocatello is great. Obviously. So I have been, since I was little, you know, I, I was born there. I, I got my first, set of roller skates, and, and then roller blades and I roller bladed from the north end to Pocatello all the way to Ross Park, to the swimming pool. And we would go swimming in the summertime during the day. We have a river that goes right through town that's totally navigable and really pretty awesome. When it comes to, you know, obstacles and things like that, we have really great bike paths. We have, mountain trails for biking. We have hiking. We have just about everything that you could imagine outdoors, that you could want in a community. And then we have a really good, small town feel in certain areas of the community as well, which I think is a value add. It's hard to find that in a lot of places, especially bigger places. And so that's one of those things that I think really makes a big difference. We could do better, I think, on our entrepreneurial support. So while we have, you know, we have a small business development center, we could have, better incubator based programs. So they say that 80% of small businesses fail within the first five years. And that's a small business that launches so 80%, meaning that that, you know, you think about the 100 businesses that might have started up, you're going to have 80 of them that are gone within five years. A lot of those we don't even really track, we don't know the numbers on, there's some state numbers, but those state numbers aren't very accurate, even, because some of them might keep their business open, but it might not do anything at all for, for years. And so they're not really keeping a track of that stuff in Pocatello. The, the switch, though, is that 80% of businesses in an incubator system succeed in five years. So where you have this opposition of 80% of businesses fail in five years, or 80% of businesses can succeed in five years. Imagine if we had, flipped 20% of successful businesses after five years versus 80% of successful businesses after five years. And we would see an economic boom and quite a bit of growth. I think we'd see a massive wage increase. So to me, that's, that's something that Pocatello needs, and something that I'm really focused on bringing. So, for me, that's that's actually one of my primary focuses. As we talk about that bottom falling out of the real estate market, to bring that in and to make sure that there's sustainable living wages, those are probably the best and fastest approaches to bring that in.

Reporter:

Sounds good. All right. Thank you so much for that. And then, switching gears a little bit, what do you think about Victor Perez's case, the attorney general's, investigation and the city's handling of the incident. So I think the city handled it like garbage. They definitely could have done a lot better. And I know that the mayor has gotten out there and said, well, we did everything right on multiple occasions. I don't believe that that's true. I believe that there's a lot more that they could have done. Right. The, the biggest thing for me is the amount of time for speculation. Speculation is dangerous in the community. That's already kind of on edge, to have this incident happen and then to have basically two weeks of no real valuable feedback, no empathy, no contacting of the family, nothing like that. It really came down to, a massive failure on the city leadership. I think the city leadership and also leadership at the police department, there there are a lot of things that could have been done differently. I am not qualified to say as far as how they handled the specific situation. I've never been in a combat situation. I've never been in a situation where I where I had to hold someone else's life in my hands, as far as you know, do I protect myself or do I protect others around me? And I wasn't there that day to observe it. I did watch the videos, and I was angry when I watched the videos. So I know that from my perspective. It was it seemed like there was an obvious alternative route that we could have taken. I believe that better training probably would have helped that in a significant way. I think that the way that the attorney general handled the situation, I don't think it should be closed. I don't think it's an open and closed case. I think that it's the kind of thing that we need to dig into more so that we can actually fix that problem so that it doesn't happen again. I, you know, I, I can't, I can't look at the police officers and say, these are murderers or something like that. I don't think that that's true. Probably on their part. I don't think they went there with the intent to kill someone. And I, I don't think that, they were I don't think that the information that they had, led them into a position where they could have made maybe better decisions. They definitely had better tools than the ones that they used. And, I would think that life preservation should be a top priority for a police officer, but, so that's probably my my biggest feedback on that. The city should have reached out to the family. They should have given every opportunity that they can to to give empathy and to show the care and, and need that a family would have in that situation. For me personally, because of the type of situation it was, and I've been asked this before and talked about this before, but my, my sister, passed away last year, this year, mentally handicapped, she was on Ozempic and ozempic. It's a, weight loss drug that was supposed to help, but in her case, it it caused other issues, when her meds were upped. They they weren't tracking it very closely. And she started to have some pretty bad, organ, lower intestinal problems and things like that, and then eventually led to her death. A lot of what we believe happened could have been in her inability to communicate because of her disabilities. That same thing to me plays into this situation where Victor Perez, his inability to communicate and the inability of the officers to understand that, really plays into a lot of the misinterpretation of what happened that day. It's hard to say without everything that's there, but.

Reporter:

Absolutely and very well spoken. Thank you so much. And again, I'm also very sorry for your loss. You know, we covered the situation. It was. Yeah. And then lastly, is there anything else that you would like to address? Either to voters or to us or for whoever?

Marley:

Yeah. So, for me, I look at Pocatello has always been the destination for me. I have always found myself coming back to Pocatello. I've always looked at it as that's where I want to be. That's home. I've had the option to live in a lot of other places. I've even considered other places and turned them down. I gave up a really good paying job to stay in Pocatello. And a lot of that has to do with. Because I think that there isn't a better place to live than right there. I believe that Pocatello is the destination. That's the message that I've said from the first week that I've been campaigning. The mindset that goes behind something like being the destination is, is a shift from, you know, being just a gate city or a pass through to other communities. I want people in Pocatello to see us for what we are. And and that is the destination.