Voter Guide: Greg Cates

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

Reporter: Just tell us a little bit about you, your work history, what you've done, how long you've lived in Pocatello, all that kind of stuff.

Cates:
All right. Well, I've lived here over 20 years, and my children grew up here. I met my my wife here, and my wife. And I own a home here. For 35 years, I worked as an investigator and also a law enforcement officer. I've been a police officer for 16 years. I end up retiring in December of 2023 after I suffered an injury at work. About a couple weeks after retiring, I ended up going to work at a credit union where I've been for the last year and a half, working as a financial counselor, helping people navigate some some serious financial problems. So that's where I spend my days now.

Reporter:
All right. Well, sounds like you have some of the bases covered with Pocatello finances, police work. Yeah, that'll probably play into the next question. Why do you want to be part of or. Excuse me, not city council. Why do you want to be mayor of Pocatello?

Cates:
So it goes back to my experience as a police officer. You know, I served the city for 16 years, and I really enjoyed working with the community, being able to make a difference in people's lives. Not a lot of not a lot of jobs people do can make the kind of a difference that you can make as a police officer. But when I hurt myself, a couple of years ago, it cut my career short. So I told myself when I retired, you know, if this city doesn't clean itself up for the next couple of years, come 2025 I’d run for mayor, and here we are. It hasn't, cleaned itself up, and I'm running for mayor.

Reporter:
All right. Let's talk about, Well, with that question, what would you like to see cleaned up as mayor? What would be your main goals?

Cates:
So there's several main goals as mayor, that I see important. Now, there's two different sides of it. As the CEO, manager of a city. My main priority from day one is going to be getting us back on a stable financial footing. We have gone through three CFOs in the last five years, and we currently do not have a CFO, appointed to the city. So, we have a large budget and some finances to get done as we end and approach the new year. So we need to make sure that we get ourselves a CFO hired, so we can start working on our finances. There's a lot of things going on that I think are wasteful spending. There's a rebranding project that's been going on in our city. They budgeted $1 million for that this year. And it's an expensive project that I don't think was necessary, especially in the place we're in right now as a city, I don't think we're rebranding. There's a lot of things we could fix before we start coming out as something new. Also, we we just wasted, over a half million dollars on a on a financial computer service that we were supposed to implement the city to help streamline our finances, and they end up ditching the project in the last hour. And, we threw away over half $1 million by stopping that project. So there's there's a lot of things that we're doing as a city, that I think are wasting taxpayers money. We need to start, getting more focused on what matters the most, which is, first off, public safety as number one, public services. You know, those are the things that people expect to be top notch because of the things that they spend the most on and our tax dollars. So, making sure that those are our stable, making sure that we start going through our budget line by line, fixing what's wrong? Automating, consolidating things, and trying to get ourselves in a better position financially. And then that'll help us move forward because we need to bring business into our city. And right now, we are one of the highest, if not the highest taxed, tax rate city in the state, which is not a good thing if you're trying to attract business here.
The bottom line matters to them. So we need to get our taxes under control. Plus, over the last few years, people have really been crushed by property taxes. And, I'm sure that they would enjoy some relief from that. So those are going to be some of the things I focus on first, as a CEO, manager of the city, now as a resident of the city. This city is becoming unaffordable for most people. Rents and mortgages have have gotten out of control. The economy is not in a good position for us, and we don't have enough jobs here to pay a wage that would not support a family. So we need to focus on economic growth and bringing jobs here that will help people earn a livable wage, so our children don't have to leave here and live elsewhere to start families and buy their first homes. I'd like to to change that so they can have those opportunities here.

00:04:53:10 - 00:05:13:13
Reporter:
Okay. Well, so, these are the same questions we ask every candidate. Some of these I feel like you guys answered before we ask the next question, which is great. But this one kind of plays into the next question what you just said. What is great about Pocatello and what could be better?

Cates:
What is great and what could be better? You know, I, I love the fact that Pocatello really is made up of hard working, blue collar people. And I, that's really who I think the majority of my voter base is, is just the the typical hardworking person that gets up in the morning, gets ready, goes to work, comes home, tries to make sure that, they have enough money to put food on the table for their families, and they get up in the morning. They do it all over again, you know, and and it's just a lot of grit and, a lot of hard work in this city, I think, is what kept us surviving. Because we are in hard times. This city is not making it easy for us to survive, but the community somehow is able to work past that. And and we're, we're we're making it work for us. So, I appreciate the hard work. The people in this community. And what was the second part of that?

Reporter:
Well, what is great about Pocatello and what could be better.

Cates:
But, yeah, a lot of things could be better financially. We could be on more solid footing as a city. The community, we we have issues with, jobs, you know, not paying a livable wage, which is, is making housing less affordable for us. One of the biggest complaints that I've had throughout my campaign, and I've been doing this now for almost 11 months, is just the the appearance of our city. It looks very old and tired. So we need to we need to start working on, livening up our city not only the way it looks, but on the entertainment level, because, most people who go out, to do date nights, with their families or even with their, their spouse or significant other, they end up leaving town and they take their money to another city, and they spend it where we would like to have that spent here. So, there's a lot of things I want to work on, bringing back to this city, revitalizing downtown, bringing back the rodeo and bringing back, like, motorsports. And, gosh, we you know who doesn't miss a drive in theater? Just so many things, that I think we could improve on. That would make our our lives a lot better here. But those would be the things that would be the finances, the jobs, the housing and cleaning up our city.

Reporter:
All right. You know, again, these are the same questions we've asked everyone running for mayor of Pocatello or city council. So what do you think about the Victor Perez case? The attorney general investigation and the city of Pocatello? His handling of the incident.

Cates:
The Victor Perez case was a tragedy, you know, and I like I said, I was a police officer for 16 years here and we we went through the whole and t for George Floyd situation where, all over the nation, they were trying to defund police. And this community always, always had the police is back. I actually was community resource officer during that time. So I was responsible for a lot of social media, and I was impressed at how many people here really just supported us, through everything, all those hard times. But when the Victor Perez shooting happened, all of that support went away. And now I'm hearing a lot of negative things about the police department. It's just crazy to think in 20s how everything shifted from support to, to disdain for our police department. And that's, that's sad because, you know, I was a police officer. I have a son with autism. And when I, you know, I when I saw the shooting, it was very difficult for me to handle that. But the shooting itself, you know, I don't want to sit here and armchair quarterback what the officers did, that's, you know, that's, optically, it was it was awful to watch, to be honest with you. The attorney general for his decision, the their decision has been made. You know, they've determined that the officer's actions, did not, you know, raise to the level of criminal. So they did not decide to to pursue charges against those officers. I think the attorney general did a good job explaining why they came up with the decisions they did to try to explain to the public, how, something that looks so egregious could be justified. And I think that's one of the hardest things for people to truly understand, really, is how do they contemplate watching, an autistic teenager be shot to death and have the officer's actions be justified? That's that's a gap that's very hard to bridge in most people's minds. So ultimately, the decision has been made. We can't change it whether you agree with the decision or not. We have to move on. We have to heal from this, and we have to find ways to to learn, to just get along as a community. The police department. We can't have a police department that the community doesn't trust. That's extremely dangerous place to be. And we have to fix that.

Reporter:
Right. And as far as the city's handling of the incident, is there anything you'd like to say about that or would have done differently?

Cates:
The mayor's absence for five days was unacceptable. He should have been out that night first thing the next morning. Just even acknowledging that a tragedy that occurred and that is being investigated, a sure people that, things are that the actions are being taken, that the officers have been placed on leave. That's that's a standard practice in an Officer-Involved shooting. They get placed on leave, and let them know that we will be as transparent with them as possible through the investigation. That communication, will be maintained day to day. You can't just, wait five days, come out, drop, a very unemotional, robotic speech to the public and then disappear again for another four months. And that's kind of what this community got. And I think that, I think our mayor did a very poor job of handling it. And what he showed us was he's not, capable of handling that kind of crisis in his position.

Reporter:
All right, thanks for that. And then question number six, is there anything I did not ask that you were hoping local news would ask or anything else you'd like to address?

Cates:
No, but we have seven days of the election. And one of the things I do want to address is, our community's voter apathy. We have a very apathetic voting base, and what I mean by that is, in past elections, we are lucky to get 30% of our community to come out and vote. And voting for local elections is extremely important because, you know, the national level elections, people tend to to, to, concentrate on. But change within a community at the local level is so much faster. And so much more impactful that it's important that we get out and vote regardless of who you vote for. Don't let this election pass you by. This is one of the most important elections that, Pocatello has ever seen. For the first time in 16 years, I think we truly have a candidate in myself that is willing and able to bring the change people want in our city, and I would love to have their vote on November 4th.