Monreal on Autry's ideas
You don't rebuild a city with a sketch. You rebuild it one neighborhood at a time. Downtown can be viewed as the microcosm for the rest of our city. There is no such thing as a neighborhood that just has a crime problem. It has a neglect problem. It has a school problem. It has a poverty problem. And it has a jobless problem. We need to bring family wage jobs to this town and we have not been doing that. There should not be a single city subsidy, for business of any kind, that doesn't bring us family wage jobs. We cannot give a redevelopment tax break to someone who is going to build a hotel and then hire 200 Latino women to clean the rooms while being paid the minimum wage. The idea that is somehow good for the tax payers in Fresno because we got a hotel out of it, is nonsense. If a developer wants public money, they're going to live up to a public standard.
That is how you fix the quality of life, crime, neglect, school problems and poverty. And city government has to use every bit of its muscle to do that. If we can create 10,000 family wage jobs for the residents of Fresno, our city will transform--and that includes our downtown.
People will have money to buy things, go to restaurants and attend entertainment events. I am prepared to bring this city to a place where others cannot.