Simplifying Public Services for Citizens
Hello, my name is Phillip Peterson, and I would like to serve you as your next City Councilman in Ward 5.
Who is Phillip?
An Open book
I am not a business owner or homeowner; I am a part-time worker for a grocery store and an aspiring game developer. I live paycheck to paycheck. The issues that concern me are the issues that affect everyone, not just the working class but also the well-off.
I am an Alexandria, Virginia native born in Georgetown, Washington DC 1977. I am the product of a single-parent home. My first experience of truly helping someone was with my father. At the age of five, I helped prevent my father from having a heroin overdose.
Throughout my life, I have been around to help people in need. Yet, I have had my shortcomings and my failures.
But all the decisions taught me is to be resilient and to want to stand up for what's right. No matter what. I've had second chances. We've all had second chances, and now it's time for North Minneapolis to have a second chance!
My approach, thought pattern, and strategies to help change and better the lives of everyone on the North side, if not the entire city, differentiates me from my opponents.
While these statements are bold, they are achievable, but only with your help with your vote and your choice can these things pass.
Why I am running
The reason why I'm running is that I've seen a need for more. I've seen a lack of effort by the current Ward 5 representative as well as the rest of the council:
Repair the roads
Bring in new businesses
Protect our supermarkets
Protect our pharmacy
Police reform and retraining
And many, many more things!
The PAIN of 2020 … and how we fix it!
Job Creation
The year 2020 was disastrous for Minneapolis. We lost the life of a resident to a heinous murder, and we lost our livelihoods due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
With those two tragedies untold, businesses and law enforcement officers fled the twin cities. Which has left our city destitute of companies and protection
My chief and number one issue to tackle will be driving new businesses and getting current small business owners all over the city to sit down and come together with banks and the local government to jump-start companies on Broadway and other areas of North Minneapolis.
Likewise fashion, I will work with the police Union, the police and sheriff's department to work on their recruiting and the possibility of the designation of new style officers specifically trained to handle specific issues that plague our communities. With a solid emphasis on getting back on the ground, neighborhood police officers not only beat cops but also neighborhood officers involved in the well-being of their neighborhood. The north side is not the ghetto; it is a beautiful group of blocks making numerous neighborhoods.
Juvenile crime and car theft
"Man, if it ain't some shots popping off over here, something wrong! Sometimes, we just shoot so we can hear something!"
I am a transplant from the East Coast. It's pretty much the same where I'm from. Yet others, most from the inner cities of Chicago, live a completely different life.
The term Here today, gone tomorrow is valid in some cases. The number of shootings and murders is astronomical.
Coupled with poverty, lack of jobs and opportunities, drug addiction, and a myriad of different issues, it is the area that most people are afraid to visit, let alone think about.
Yet a large majority of the youth here in Minneapolis Northside are from these inner cities. It is regrettable and troubling because I see it for what it truly is: constant systemic, unending PTSD!
The only way to help these children, their parents, and their neighborhoods is through counseling and emphasizing mental health and trauma response interaction and prevention.
With that in mind, I would like to work with the University of Minnesota and its mental health services department and any other agencies that handle juvenile trauma, PTSD, sexual abuse, and the like.
But there must also be more interactive activity-based solutions for our youth, especially during summertime.
It would also be one of my plans to start a Teen Summer Youth Work program and apprenticeship. These programs, which should be open to all of you from the ages of 14 and up, should help provide them with job skills, work habits, and a sense of well-being because we're going to pay them!
Police fund redistribution and police liability
It is redundant and Paramount to idiocy for an officer of the law with a sworn duty to protect and serve the communities they work to be required or even ask to pay liability insurance. The officers should never be a liability. This type of thinking causes us to continue to have the issues we have today.
So once again, working with the Minneapolis Police Department, Sheriff's Department, and Police Union, we're going to sit down, and we're going to figure it completely out there will be no cutting corners. No new budgets for extra guns, bullets, ammunition, or siege engines for weapons of war are not necessary. The battle we have to fight is not indeed physical. It's mental. We will also come up with a complete and comprehensive police training module. With over 80% of our police force lost in Minneapolis, it should be straightforward, and I say that with all gravity to change the police culture of Minneapolis and remove this burdensome stain off this great City.
Snow and plowing
Every year, although we know we are one of the coldest states in the Union, we continue to have warm weather State problems regarding snow and ice removal or prevention.
First, I propose that all major highway entrances and exits be heated. Most of our snow accidents happen coming onto the highway or off due to the snow pile-up in the triangle shape it goes. This means I also want to heat every corner of Minneapolis systematically. If our corners and intersections were heated and snow-free, we would see a dramatic and drastic drop in snow-related accidents. I will also be looking to work with local landscaping companies and private contractors for around-the-clock plowing of side streets, alleys, and major roadways so that no one gets unduly stuck and misses work.