Welcome everyone to tonight's candidate forum. Before we begin, I want to invite our Spanish-speaking community members to click the button at the bottom of your Zoom screen for interpretation and choose the Spanish option to hear the forum in that language. We will wait just a moment for our forum interpreter, Rosabel Rice, to translate what I've just said, switch over to the Spanish language channel, and then we'll begin. Bueno, vamos a quisieramos darle la bienvenida a nuestros escuchas en español y si desean recibir interpretación al español, lo que van a hacer en un momento van a aparecer al pie de su computadora un globo o en sus teléfonos tres puntos suspensivos y van a encontrar interpretación, escogen español y podrán recibir la interpretación y muy bienvenidos. We're good to go. Oh, you're on mute, Elizabeth. Good way to get going tonight. Thanks, Mandy. Welcome to the Colorado State Senate District 18 candidate forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Boulder County. My name is Elizabeth Crowe. I'm a proud member of the League and I am pleased to serve as moderator for tonight's forum. The League of Women Voters is a non-partisan political organization. In 2020, we're celebrating 100 years of encouraging informed and active participation in government and influencing public policy through education and advocacy on a wide range of issues. To remain non-partisan, League never supports or opposes political candidates or parties. For this and several other forums, we are pleased to be partnering with Longmont public media. According to FCC policy, candidate forums must be broadcast in their entirety except by media reporting on events. Candidates or their staff are asked not to record the forum. However, it will be made available online for public viewing through election day. The Colorado State Senate consists of 35 senators who are elected to four-year terms. Each senator is limited to serving two consecutive terms. As of the 2010 census, state senators serve an average of 143,691 residents. State Senate District 18 includes NYWAT, the City of Boulder, Netherlands, Jamestown, Lions, and other communities. The format for tonight's forum will be as follows. Each candidate will have one minute for an opening statement. We will then begin with questions which have been submitted electronically online to the League or by League members. Questions have been reviewed by our League of Women Voters volunteer screeners and will be addressed to all candidates rather than directing a question to a particular candidate. We will try to ask the candidates as many questions as time permits. Each candidate will have up to one minute or 90 seconds to answer the question, and as the moderator, I will announce the time allowed to answer the questions, and our timekeeper will help you stay on track. Tonight's forum participants include in ballot order Steve Fenberg, Democrat, and Peg Cage, Republican. Let's start with opening statements. Beginning with you, candidate Fenberg, you have one minute. Great. Well, thank you to the League for hosting this. It seems like everything about this election is abnormal, so doing candidate forums and making sure that there are ways for folks to engage in this way is incredibly helpful. I guess what I would say is it's been the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, but also the biggest honor of my life to be able to serve in the Colorado Senate. I got elected in 2016, and then in 2018, I was proud to be supported by my colleagues to become the Senate Majority Leader. And the work we have done over the last several years, I think, is transformative. We have made huge strides when it comes to climate and energy. We have made huge strides on equality issues and racial justice and making our voting system more accessible for everybody. And I can't wait to continue that work to make even more progress on the things that so many of us care about in Boulder County, and that's what I'm looking forward to doing over the next four years. Thank you. And Candidate Cage, you're next. Thank you very much for hosting this to the League of Women Voters. It's always been a part of the process to go through these forums, and I've never been in one. I've helped to get other candidates there as the chairman of Boulder County Republicans and as the president of Longmont Republican Women. I've always been a leader trying to lead people to get into the election process, the process of getting their own representatives in government. And this time I was asked because the ballot place was empty and we don't want to leave it empty. We have to have a good fight, right, Steve? So I am running to represent Senate District 18 in the state Senate, and I would like to listen to you. I'd love to have your vote and I'd love to get your support. Thank you. Thanks, both of you. Now we will begin with the question segment of the forum. Again, I will let you know ahead of time whether you have one minute or up to 90 seconds to answer the question. And please keep an eye on our timekeeper who will give you that signal at 15 seconds and stop. If you are mid-sentence when your time is up, please feel free to just finish that sentence and then we'll move on to the next candidate. For the first question, we will start with candidate Cage, and the question is this. There are many COVID impacts on our state, which result in economic challenges for 2021 and beyond. What are some of your top funding priorities given these challenges? And you will have one minute to answer that question. By funding priorities, I assume that you mean the money that the state should be giving people. I think that the federal grants that were given to Colorado should go to businesses and help people open their businesses. I think that the regulations and the owner's stipulation, the owner's mandates that have been put on business owners and making them shut their businesses down is just something that I would fight to lift and let people decide if how much risk they want to take, if they want to open their businesses up, or if they want to go and attend meetings or go to a restaurant or to a business and how close they want to be to people. And I think it's an onerous government that would get in there and tell us how to live our lives like this. Thank you. Candidate Fenberg. Thanks. We are seeing devastating impacts on our economy and our state budget because of this crisis. And it started as a health care crisis. I think it's very quickly morphed into an economic crisis for so many folks. And so I think what we choose to prioritize with funding is an important question. In the end, we are not going to have a healthy state budget. And we didn't have one, frankly, before. And we are definitely not having one now. We are looking at billions of dollars of cuts. So in terms of priorities, I would say it has to be providing basic support for our health care system so that we are getting through this from a health care perspective. But then also K-12 education and basic government services that we absolutely need to be, unfortunately, filling the hole that we've had before this crisis, but has only gotten deeper now. And then I also think we need to make sure we are investing resources into economic support for families and for the small businesses that are suffering. And without additional support likely are going to have to shut their doors and that has a domino effect on our economy. So those are the three areas that I would prioritize. Thank you. For the next question, and I'm thinking we'll just go ahead, Mandy, and do a minute and a half, 90 seconds for each of these questions. You don't have to use all the time if you don't want to, but feel free. The next question is, and we'll start with candidate Fenberg. District 18 covers a wide variety of land uses, including farms and ranches. What is your position on the reintroduction of gray wolves into Colorado, which may very well migrate into your district? It was very beneficial to Yellowstone National Park. Does that outweigh the potential loss of livestock? So that's a good question. The reintroduction of wolves, I'm guessing most folks know, but it is on the ballot as a ballot question this year. I support it. I'm not going to say that I know every detail about it. I probably know a lot more about some of the other ballot measures than this one, but I support it. I think it's important because the ecosystem in Colorado is not only important to our economy, but it's important to our way of life. And I think there is a way to do it where we are keeping tabs on it and making sure that the reintroduction goes well. And a lot of scientists and public lands managers and folks that I've talked to that I trust feel confident that we can do this in a way that doesn't have major economic impacts for folks who use land for ranching and for farming and things like that. So I support it. This is, frankly, we are going to have wolves come into Colorado anyways. We've seen them already. And so I think if it's going to happen, it should be done by folks who really understand how to keep an ecosystem healthy and can watch it and can study it over time so that it's done right. Thank you. And Candida Cage. I absolutely am opposed to this measure. I think it is a misnomer to say that we are reintroducing wolves because this type of wolf has never lived in Colorado before. And we do have wolves, but they are being managed by the people who are already here. And they are not a new challenge.  In other states where they have been introduced, it's been devastating. There's a film called Wolves in Government Clothing and it just shows how devastating this is. People had to build cage boxes for their children to wait for the school bus in because children were being eaten and their livestock.  These particular breed of wolves carry diseases that we don't need to have spread in Colorado. We don't need it to be spread to our other livestock. And I think it's a terrible idea. I don't think that we on the front range ought to be making decisions for how the farmers and ranchers over on the western slope are managing their farms. We should not introduce wolves. Thank you both of you. The next question is how important do you feel fracking is to Colorado's economy? How would you weigh the economic factors with the health issues related to oil and gas? Should it be encouraged or discouraged? And again, we'll do 90 seconds for the question. We will start this with Candidate Cage. Fracking is imperative to Colorado because it gives us the natural gas that we run our converted coal power plants by natural gas now. They're clean. I remember I lived in the foothills in the 1970s and we always saw the brown cloud and then they introduced natural gas buses and natural gas vehicles that helped reduce it. We introduced natural gas fireplaces to replace the wood burning fireplaces. I think if you do away with the source and Colorado is basically self-sustaining as far as getting our own natural gas, if you do away with that, you go back to the brown cloud and it's much more detrimental to not have that natural gas than it is to have it. The fracking practices have evolved into very safe and the people who are doing that, they don't want to destroy the economy any more than I do or you guys do. We all want the economy and the ecology to do well and we cannot have either if we get rid of natural gas. Thank you. Candidate Fenberg. Thanks. I believe that if oil and gas extraction is going to happen, especially in the front range where there are population centers, it needs to be done in the safest possible manner. That includes many things but many of those reforms were included in a bill that I was the chief sponsor of which was Senate Bill 181 that I'm very proud of and a lot of it's getting implemented actually right now. We need to prioritize transition. It's not just a comparison between natural gas and coal but there actually is an alternative to those two options and that is focusing more on renewables. We know we can get to an electric grid that is predominantly renewables pretty close to 100% is very doable and it's actually cheaper. The market tells us that if we were to allow it to happen, get rid of the structural barriers that we have put in place over the last 100 or so years, that the market will actually tell us that solar and wind is how we should be powering our economy. I believe that if fracking is going to happen, it needs to happen with the absolute utmost care for health and safety and I believe that is starting to happen because of Senate Bill 181 and I think what we really need to focus on is improving our air quality and moving us from being an economy that relies on fossil fuel extraction to being one that relies on renewables. Thank you both. The next question will start with you candidate Fenberg and we are addressing the position itself of a state senator of this question. It is describe what you feel is the most important role of a state senator when it comes to supporting teachers and our public education system. Well, I think the most important role of the state senator for education and teachers is is funded and that's not to say there are another roles for the legislature but a lot of the impact on teachers in our education system, a lot of those decisions are made at a local level. So I support everything that we can do as a state to ensure that school districts have the resources they need to, for one thing, compensate teachers better. My wife is a teacher so I know firsthand how poorly they sometimes are paid but we need to be doing more as a state to ensure that it's a profession that grows and that it's something that gets the respect that it deserves and by that I mean we need to make sure we are not having onerous accountability programs. We are not having onerous testing that maybe doesn't actually result in better classrooms and instead at a state level focus on removing the structural barriers, frankly, that have created a situation where we grossly underfund public schools. And so I think the most important thing that I can do as a legislator is ensure that we are bringing in additional revenue in whatever way we possibly can and dedicating that towards K-12 education so that the local districts can support their teachers better than they're able to right now. Thank you. Candidate Cage, same question. I agree that that would be our responsibility to make sure that the money set aside for education would go to education. I'd like to see a switch from the emphasis being on administrators and school districts to being on the child and that however we can get the child the best education that would be how we proceed. I like the idea of removing a lot of the onus regulations that Stephen mentioned and I would like to see innovation come from the parents. The parents, it's their kids. They need to take responsibility for how their children are educated. I'd love to see more charter schools. I'd like to see school credit being allowed for things like 4-H and going to the county fair and showing and raising livestock and doing research, science projects through 4-H and through the county fair and other institutions would naturally pop up if they were allowed, if the children were followed by the money and the parents were able to decide what kind of an education they wanted their specific children to get. Thank you. Next question will start with you, candidate Cage. The question is, if elected as senator, how would you ensure to represent the interests of all District 18 residents regardless of political party affiliation? I love District 18. I've lived here since 1970 and we've got a great population. We've got very highly educated people and strong servant heart people and good hard workers. We've started three businesses here and I don't think that there is a problem with the people so much in having political divide as there is the politicians and I think if I'm elected it will be because people want to have their voices heard in the Senate and they will know that I will be a representative and that I'm there to take government off their back. It's supposed to be a government of the people not a government on the people and I think that people would appreciate me as a senator. Thank you. Candidate Fenberg, same question. Thanks. Obviously the city of Boulder Senate District 18 at least is probably safe to say a leaning democratic district but I absolutely feel like I do everything I possibly can to be an accessible representative. I think one of the most important things is getting out of the Capitol building even when it is not convenient and making sure that there are opportunities for folks to engage with me in my office. I do town halls regularly throughout session. I do some that are more large-scale like big events and then I do others that are more like a coffee or at a brewery where you can just sort of pull up a chair and stay for as long or as little as you'd like. I do everything I can to make it accessible so that different types of people whether you work or whether you're retired or you're young that you have a way to get in touch with my office. I also work a lot with constituents on actual bills and I think some of the best bills that I've passed are ones that came from constituents to me and I encourage folks to do that to be part of the process rather than just electing someone and then hearing back from them four years later on if they want to reelect them. I think the most important thing is to be transparent inclusive and accessible and then if you truly do that it doesn't matter what political party that constituent is from but it's more about the issues and what we can do through the legislature to improve their lives. Thank you. The next question moving to reactions about some specific state legislation. In this past legislative session the House passed HB 20-1081 which would provide multilingual voting ballots to counties with more than 2,000 people or 2.5 percent of the population that is not fluent in English. Would you support this bill if it is reintroduced in the Senate in 2021 and candidate Fenberg will start with you. Great. I do support the bill. I supported the bill before. I believe that was one of the bills that kind of got caught up in the right when the pandemic was happening but I expect it will probably be reintroduced and I would support it. I think it's important. We probably have the most accessible and most secure election system in the entire country and I think we should be very proud of it but that doesn't mean we can just sit back and be okay with what it is. We always need to improve it to be able to increase access to folks so if you are eligible to vote that you absolutely have the ability to vote. And one of those is by making sure that the election system which can be very complicated for a lot of people is as accessible as possible to folks who may not speak English as their first language. So I think this is important because it's a very basic service that we should provide and it can be done in a way that's cost effective. Maybe we don't mail the ballots out in multiple languages to everybody but we start with making sure they're available at the polling site and then taking it from there but I think it's important to make our election system the foundation of our democracy absolutely as accessible to everybody who's eligible. Thank you and candidate Cage. That's a tough one. I believe that America's main language should be English and while I welcome immigrants and people who would like to partake in the process of electing their representatives I think that if you come to America and you want to partake of that you should take up with the national language which is English and I don't know if they ever passed that but I know it's been on the ballot many times to make it the official language. I agree that everything that is on the ballot should be accessible to everyone to learn about it. I love that the League of Women Voters has their interpretations and recommendations and I know the Democrat Party and the Republican Party have their recommendations. I don't think it's the role of government to change the balloting. I think we need to keep the balloting as safe as possible. I totally disagree that we have a safe and secure, well we may have safe and secure but we don't have election integrity which means that only people who are eligible to vote and are voting and we don't have that. Thank you. For the next question we'll start with candidate Cage and it's regarding transportation. Transportation and specifically public transportation needs are growing and evolving in Boulder County and our region. How would you ensure our state transportation systems and infrastructure meet our current and future needs? Well Longmont has been paying for, Longmont and Boulder County have been paying for light rail for many years and we have not seen any of it and I'm wondering if it's a good thing. I mean there's only two rail lines in the world that are running in the red I mean in the black. All of the others are in the red and it basically falls to government then to maintain the rails and and everything and it's it's not an efficient way to do transportation. I think improving our roads is is integral to the responsibility for our legislature and for our county commissioners that's it used to be the county road commission. They used to have to make sure that the roads were taken care of. When you're talking about interstate then of course you need to find innovative ways to do this. I think increasing and auditing RTD making sure that they're using the monies that they're already receiving efficiently and I think that we could tap our citizens for ideas and instead of pushing pushing things that are going to make a lot of money for a small amount of people and be utilized by a small amount of people we could tap our citizens for good ideas for transportation. Thank you candidate Fenberg. So I think the way we fund transportation in Colorado is incredibly outdated. It's largely funded by the gas tax and as cars get more efficient and use less gas that means we're going to have less money for transportation. It also means the more people that drive electric vehicles they're not paying into the fund that is the main fund for transportation funding in Colorado. So we need to think differently. We need to make sure everybody pays their fair share. Everybody who uses the road should pay the fair share that they should put in to have a 21st century transportation system. That means probably charging EV drivers a little bit more than they currently pay for the registration fees and it means a few you know potentially increase in the gas tax which we've we haven't done in a very long time and so it's only it's actually lost value because of inflation. So we need to have a comprehensive I hope bipartisan agreement out of the legislature on how we are going to fund transportation because we have a huge glut of needs and not nearly enough revenue coming in and I agree with Miss Cage about RTD. I think there needs to be more accountability there. I will note though that that is the funding for RTD does not come through the legislature of the general fund. We fund CDOT and that's where we can make a big difference in terms of long-term comprehensive funding. Thank you for the next question. We'll start with candidate Fenberg and it is in your own words what does the term racial equity mean to you? If elected how would you work to ensure all Black and Latino Coloradans and other people of color are treated equitably? Well I think racial equity to me means that everybody no matter their race or their background or ethnicity have a fair shot at opportunity that everybody else has and that they are not discriminated against in a structural manner by society or by the government and I don't think we are there yet by any means. I think we have a long ways to go to have true racial equity in Colorado and I think there are many things we need to do. We need to look at what are structural pieces that we actually have control over that we can start moving in the right direction. I think we did a lot for this when we passed Senate Bill 217 which is the police accountability bill just a few months ago and that was actually very much bipartisan almost every single member of the state senate voted for it and so I think law enforcement is a big part of it. I think there's a lot of inequities when it comes to housing and housing policy and who has access to affordable and accessible housing and so I think we in order to address it better we need to look at all of the different sectors that impact someone's life and make sure we are proactively breaking down the structural barriers that perpetuate racism in our system. Thank you. Candidate Cage? Racial equity to me is a made up social justice term and I go back to the Constitution of the United States where we are all created equal and our government is to represent all people equally and any program that acknowledges one color, race, religion over another is not constitutional. We have a great variety of people and that is a delightful thing to have all of these people working together and when we have people who are trying to get more from government than others because of the color of their skin or you know it's just not right. I'm sorry. I believe in equality as in we were created by a loving God and we are all created equally and we have the same right to the American government which was created underneath the biblical laws where we all serve under, well we don't serve, the government serves us equally and the law affects us equally. That's what I believe. Thank you. The next question will start with Candidate Cage and it is, what do you consider to be a fair state tax system? What changes might you want to make or support to ensure fair and equitable tax system if elected? I love Colorado's flat tax and I think that that's very fair. It's been low and reasonable. When we do our taxes it's complicated at the federal level. We get done with that and we can just figure out the Colorado tax very easily. I think adding complications, making it a progressive tax is a very bad idea. Did I answer the question? That was the question, yes. Candidate Fenberg, you're next. Thanks. This is probably maybe not a big surprise but somewhere, one of the areas that Peg and I are very much going to disagree on. I think a flat tax is not good. I think it disproportionately impacts lower income folks and people on the higher income side of things are not frankly paying their fair share and so I would support moving over to a progressive tax although that is illegal under the state constitution because of the taxpayer bill of rights and that is one of the areas of Tabor that I think is most damaging to our state. I also think we should increase taxes. I'm not afraid to say that. I think we don't have nearly enough funding for the population that we have right now and so I would support something, a policy that increases taxes especially on those that are much wealthier and potentially reduces taxes for those who are lower income. There's different ways to do that than just simply having a different tax rate but I also think we need to decouple from the federal tax code. We largely mirror what happens federally so when Donald Trump passes a tax cut, that means Colorado passes the tax cut and so I think we need to make changes so that we have a more fair and more accessible tax system that makes sense for Colorado not something that is at the whims of Congress and Washington DC. Thank you. Next question we'll start with you Senator candidate Fenberg. The question is please share your perspectives on guns and gun safety. Would you support policies to help ensure safe and secure storage of firearms? So yes I do support that policy and then some. I think we should have a 72 hour at least waiting period before someone can purchase a firearm. I think we should improve our background checks that we do for gun purchases. I think I support licensing gun shops. I think there's so much more we can do and we should do. Frankly this is turned into such a political debate and it's often left versus right. It's really about mental health also. This is an issue where the fact that someone who's unstable can walk into a gun shop and walk out with a gun potentially hurt others but definitely hurt themselves I think is a tragedy and it's preventable and we absolutely should be doing a whole lot more to protect our communities and to keep people safe especially those who are struggling with mental illness and there's a whole lot more we have to do on mental illness and mental health as a state as well. But that's obviously a little bit of a different topic but I support having more regulations and more common sense laws that protect people and protect our communities. Thank you and candidate Cage same question. No I would not support of course a law that makes it harder for a person to get to their gun when they need to defend themselves. We see cities crying out to defund the police. I'm sorry it is my responsibility to protect my family if somebody's trying to get in my home they're going to be sorry and I am not going to appreciate government regulations that'll make it harder for me to get my gun. This progressive legislature has done terrible damage to the constitutional rights of the citizens of Colorado to defend themselves and that would be one thing that I would want to overturn if I were put into the Senate. I think that we would have to go through and do a lot of repealing and trust the citizens of the United States and of this county to make decisions for themselves.  Thank you. For the next question we'll start with candidate Cage. Colorado is again experiencing extreme wildfires, drought conditions and other impacts attributed to climate change. What would you do as senator to address this so our future generations do not increasingly experience these problems? It is imperative that we take care of our ecology, our environment and that we do not allow for bad government to be detrimental and I think that bad government is buying up a bunch of land and then not taking care of it and allowing the underbrush to grow and the beetle kill to stand and then the fires get out of hand. There's some answering that the state needs to do to the people of Colorado and excuse me but I think that we're experiencing pollution because of all this smoke. If we had regulations that were followed if the state was taking care of the land that they own and clearing the underbrush I think it'd be easier to take care of the forest fires. As far as the climate change I don't think that all scientists agree that we have man-made climate change. I've been really happy with this year we've we've gotten quite a bit of rain and I think the climate is changing. I don't think it's people. I think that we need to be very careful about how we plan like the pioneers came out hundreds of years ago and they understood there wasn't water everywhere they would need it for farming so they made a wonderful canal system. Thank you. Thank you. Candidate Fenberg, same question. I do believe in climate change I believe it is exacerbating the wildfires and making things much worse when it comes to a lot of the natural weather events that we would see anyways but they're they're they're worse now because of climate and there might be one or two scientists out there that don't believe that but the absolute vast majority believe in that connection and can can connect the dots very easily. I think sure we definitely need to do better when it comes to forest management no question we need resources to do that and we are starving our state and we can barely keep public schools open for for more than four days a week in most districts so we definitely don't have the money to do the proper amount of forest management that we probably should be doing so I do I do think that's a good point we need to do more of that but I also think in the end we need to also fund a response to when there are fires and we absolutely need to do our part to bring in our emissions down because that is in the end what is actually making these fires so much worse and that's a global problem but that doesn't mean we should wash our hands of it and say there's nothing we can do we need to do our part as well and set an example and and be part of the solution rather than just saying oh maybe it's coming from California or maybe there's nothing we can do because it's not truly man-made I think we know the answers to all these big questions we have the technology and the science to do it we just need to do it. Thank you so for our final question this evening before closing statements we will start with candidate Fenberg and the question is please share your strategy to promote and secure more affordable housing for our region and state. How can we ensure housing for people with a wide range of incomes? It's a great question it's obviously something that's that's a big deal for Boulder County but I would say it's it's a big deal almost everywhere in Colorado these days. We there's several things we can do I mean we are a very much a local control state so a lot of it is the result of zoning and different policies on a county and sometimes a city level but what we can do as a state is make sure that there is funding available for those cities and counties that that have this need and are willing to build much more affordable housing that's one thing that we can do and and again that comes back to our fiscal situation as a state but and we've made big strides on this actually the last couple of years we've we have put quite a bit of money into affordable housing I would say it's it's maybe a little more than a drop in the bucket but it's not nearly what we should be doing to solve this crisis but I also think we need to do a whole lot more when it comes to homeless outreach and providing basic safety net services for folks who are not just looking for a slightly more affordable place but who don't have a place we need to do a lot more for those communities as well and then I also think there's maybe a role for the state to play to incentivize communities to have more pro housing policies at their local level and work collaboratively with them the other thing is we need to promote regional solutions to this problem this can't just be a city by city thing because we know that if one city is not affordable it just moves people to another community and so on so we need to think holistically not just city by city thank you well those were the questions for this evening thank you both for your answers oh I'm so sorry I'm so sorry it was jumping ahead yes please go ahead candidate cage to me affordable housing is a house that someone can afford and I don't believe that it's up to the government to decide who gets housing and it's not up to the government to take from one person in order to give to another person government is forced we need it to be forced because we need laws enforced but we do not need government to come in and take from somebody else's pocket to give to me and vice versa if the regulations were lifted yes there are a lot of regulations at the local level and I haven't studied the state level so much but I it is impossible to be a homeowner if you if you don't have a thousand dollars a month who's got a thousand dollars a month to spend on rent when they're trying to just get started when when I was young I bought a mobile home in boulder county because my mom said that the regulations had just come where no more mobile home parks could be built so they had just limited the amount of affordable housing and same with apartments and all that the people who own apartments they have such onerous restrictions and responsibilities that they they cannot provide housing it it needs to be fixed thank you both again for the questions my apologies again candidate cage for my ear hi elizabeth thank you we will now move to closing statements and for that we will go in reverse ballot order and we'll start with you candidate cage one minute please thank you I believe that we are supposed to have a government of the people I created a website government of the people dot us as in us we are supposed to be the people running the government the government is not supposed to be oppressive telling us what to do inside our homes outside our homes whether we can go to work whether we are essential or not um we are all essential we are all created equal we all have innovative thoughts and dreams the american dream they called it the american dream if you can't get out there and start a business and grow it and be sure that the government is going to make sure that your property is going to stay in your pocket then your government has failed you and I would like to get the government back on the side of the people and take all of the onerous restrictions off and let the people thrive if the people thrive they'll pay lots of taxes and the state will thrive thank you thank you and candidate fennberg go ahead please thanks Elizabeth um thank you to the league for for hosting this uh like I said at the beginning I think it's incredibly important um that these types of things go on even in these crazy times and and I want to thank um peg for uh you for participating um I actually think uh we probably agree on more things than we realize and and I look forward to having more conversations and and maybe even working on some issues together um I'm proud of the work that we've done in the state senate over the last couple of years um since I've been elected uh I'm looking forward to doing more of that work and carrying on a lot of the work that we've started uh for uh for boulder county but also for the state of Colorado overall um I I feel like I've done a good job it's been the honor of my life to to represent this district um and I can't wait to go back um as uh someone who I think represents the issues uh and the values of this community um I'm excited uh and ready to to roll up my sleeves and get back to work um especially in these uncertain times so thank you everybody for for letting me serve and I hope to serve another four years for you thank you on behalf of the League of Women Voters I'd like to thank both of our candidates uh for being here this evening uh for participating not only in tonight's forum but also in the democratic process we know that running for office and serving as an elected official is hard work and we really appreciate your efforts thank you to our lead candidate forum volunteers Josephine Porter Peggy Leach our operations director Mandy Nuku Sergio Agilis with Longmont Public Media and gracias to our interpreter Roosevelt Rice and finally thank you to the district 18 voters participating tonight as viewers it's up to all of us to make sure we respect and work to protect our democratic processes too many people have suffered and succeeded in the struggle to win these rights for us not to use them it starts with being an informed and active voter to check out other important issues affecting our community feel free to visit the league voter information website vote411.org which very soon will have all the information election you need this forum will be rebroadcast on Longmont Public Media's channel 8 and will also appear on the league's youtube channel look for links on the league's website at lwvbc.org or our facebook page and finally the League of Women Voters of Boulder County works throughout the year to help empower voters and defend democracy if you want to lend your time and skills to encourage civic engagement for all people in the non-partisan manner please join us all the information you need is at lwvbc.org and with that thank you again to our candidates and have a great evening thank you very much thanks


Nice flight this morning. It is now eight hours later and I'm getting a little snack before I go running! That's right! Five days off. Today is the first day back. I'm going to test out the planter fasciitis in my left foot. See how it does in downtown Denver? It's raining out. We're just rolling folks. It is almost the weekend, by the way. When you're watching this, I hope your weekend's going well. All right, let's get ready. Oh, it kind of tastes like pumpkin pie. First two miles, my planter has been not feeling great. I stopped for five minutes, stretched really, really well after a two-mile warm-up, and I can't even feel it right now. So, keep stretching out there. If you have planter fasciitis issues, just keep stretching. Okay, I'm going to do two to three more miles. See how it feels. Give you an update back at the car. Thing was good. Lifting was good. It's on the swing. Gentle. Gentle. Gentle. Yeah, he's okay. Now he's gentle push. Yeah, they're not well. I'm going to have to get the ladder. Mama, good job. He's like, what am I doing? What am I doing? First time on the swing. I've got to tighten it a little bit, but it's working. It's working. Worth its weight in gold, folks. Worth its weight in gold. I'm just into your massage in my foot. Endless, endless joy and hours of play. It's so simple. They don't need an Xbox. They don't need an iPad. They need a swing connected to a tree. That's all. It's at night. That's why I'm charging the headlamps, getting them plugged in. I love that you can charge the Petzl Nano. I think it's the Nano. Through your USB, right through your computer. And this, folks, is my Raidlight Vest. Remember, I gave this a little preview about a week ago. Up a right-hand corner. Go check that out. So tomorrow, putting it through the paces, literally. And what arrived in the mail? The Lecky Poles from Italy. They arrived. These are the ultra-running version of the Lecky running pole. And so, yeah, I think I just repeated myself. Bottom line, I will open these up for you guys tomorrow at the trailhead. And then I run Deer Creek? A lot. Loops, D-Loopsie, Loop-D-Loopy.


TLO was popping we are on twitch we are not live, but you can leave a like comment subscribe Turn on your post notification bells. Now. Let's continue to grow the family from Chicago to the UK man This is a warning. I did not glorify us sensationalize and condone any of the act stores told I'm here simply to educate myself and others of the stories in the current state of issues around the world a Doe dialogue strong language viewer discretion advice Don't forget we are product with the blueprint mastermind Link down in the description man. We've done some good stuff If you look for any of my old videos, they're over here on Facebook. We also in the description Essex gangster gave 328,000 pounds to an undercover police Frank Frank Frank. Oh, this is okay. What does this say? This is this is my um, I The taboo room to some new channel. I found man. Go sub up man. He'd be dropping some good stuff struggling to make ends meet With children to feed Frank made a decision that he will regret for the rest of his life going on the run and So you're there really? Some woman there and I'm all the way there telling him to the airplanes landed and everyone stood up To Six nice town. It's a good one from Epping, which is a little town at the end of central line in Essex Nice town, you know, I was brought up in a council house Down a lot of road, but you know people I think they've bought their houses now It's probably not a council house right now Like football pitch down the bottom filled as far as you I can see my parents split up when I was younger But nothing traumatic, you know, everyone I went to school with and everyone in my little Circle and I was younger parents weren't together. It wasn't bad, you know I just played football till the street lights come on and then over the forests What was your education like growing up? Left school in no GCSE so messed around, you know, no one's playing but me just just messed around and just was a hyperactive Energy kid like It's PE and drama and things like that But never when it come to English maths and things like ours Just think the maths teacher used to step in it go out So, yeah, I didn't I wasn't an angel. I don't think How did you get into the world of drugs and Frank? I was scaffolding and earning really and not it wasn't rubbish money It was like 60 pound a day But I had Mortgage and bills like to travel into London. I just couldn't afford to live So I wasn't involved in drugs for a few years and I still remember to this day I was in Tesco's buying the Tesco like blue stripe food. I think I spent like 30 quid Esco blue stripe food. What is like? Is that like the food like specific for Tesco? Like Tesco brand it's Tesco grocery store, right? Okay filled a whole trolley up walking out Tesco's and I remember thinking I still remember it thinking I fed up with this. I was jumping the train to go work I push him for people through the barriers I decided you know what? I'm gonna get back into getting involved in drugs. I started doing the low-level stuff again And I didn't drink in smoke. I was reliable. I went to work done a few like Things within the drugs world and then I've got a phone call from someone higher up the chain you want to Do like bigger drops for money and for bigger bits never never told how much or anything It was just like pick a bag up do this and I said yeah fair enough Obviously I asked how much money it was and he said Tell me how much it was. It was more than what I was earning scaffold. It was like a week It was more what I was earning scaffolding but sorry in between me having my daughter and Me getting that job I split up with their mum like the relationship broke down. He just did for views part company and then So I got involved in this Delivering drugs and things like that and I think after so when was that probably ran 2007 my daughter's boss about early 2008 and then 2009 I got arrested For conspiracies like I'll say so talking through the whole case or the whole the whole situation Prior to you getting caught. I was told and that's the worst part So you so basically you was trying to you know get some extra money to make a better life for yourself You is tired.     This is before I was in the observation, obviously I walked into a calf and it was like a bakery Failing boys and the woman behind the counter said Like I walked in there's just me and a bloke sitting in the window She said there's anybody want anything else, but I was walking out So I was taking my food away and I felt strange so she's implied and she didn't know me Didn't know I was what I was doing She's implying that someone's been sitting their ages So I've walked out and just being paranoid because of being in that world. I've sort of looked in his cup and I thought It's like coffee like a scummy coffee ring there and then I Quickly looked him up and down. He had like a square I can't I say a camera bag, but you know the old-fashioned camcord. It's like square heavy bag But like a sort of out-dory one not rucksack and then he's dressed for all weathers and I've looked him up really quickly But this is as I'm walking past. I've seen his ear.  So I've gone around the corner picked the bags up Said to the bloke who's put the bags in my boot. He said I said to him There's a bloke in the cafe place. He said don't my foot that we're going miles away So I didn't think nothing of it as we're driving off the guys put an orange Like I had a door jacket on these walking past like the pond bit. So he's he's not followed me to he's just around Nah, bro at that point. I would have x-nade x-nade no sir mission abort You've seen the skin-colored earpiece, you know what this is That place the last bit weird show of all the way out to Pondley Fract Castle up parts in the car park and that people have gone to gun talk to these other drug dealers and then I've been called over and I've just got over literally got out put the bags in the car and the people Like the Northerners that they met from up north they were swearing and talk like that. It just didn't seem right So you think not like there was trying too hard. That's what undercover cops do They tried too hard to fit in not saying I've been on loads of those like done loads of stuff But I've been on enough like me. It's I drove and met Northerners and southern, you know, I drove around England doing it Just think that something came right and what I saw early in the day. Anyway, so where I'm There's a second guess myself nuts for you know, don't worry about it.  Oh, I leave it at that Driving back pulled in a petrol station the the bloke. I followed up there pulled in after me So what you do is it just gets a petrol. So I'll get a drink as I've Got out the car to a petrion looked up a white vans pulled out and the guy from Faden boys earlier that day Now I'm in lead.  So I've quickly running the toilet not not knowing You see how he did you hey get away from me, bro. You had the stuff not me I didn't have a clue what to do really so running the toilet and I'm sitting in shit Well, I don't can't sit any all day now I've noticed above the toilet the wind is there and I thought to myself. Oh, that's facing the exit Chumps up and I stand on toilet looking out the window That's cars drove off and the vans followed that car thought right good.  I'm like really Bro, come on. They're playing you I said, I'm not like I'm not like the sharpest in the bun I know when I see a bloke's face and I saw him again. So anyway Didn't think nothing of it and then months later after a few weird things happening. I've got a They're building the case on you I stood for conspiracy supply class a and money laundering and It was an undercover sting so the people they met in the car part was soccer serious They had national crime agency now and it was for two hundred ninety nine kilos of cocaine I I knew I knew the money I knew the money that was around all this was a good money like a lot of money, but I didn't realize it was that But I'm not sitting here making people feel sorry for me. Like this is the shit that happens when you get involved in crime So, what was you exactly dropping off that day money? 328 grand it was I understand getting out the sharpest tool of the instrument, but you just said you dropped 328 grand And you didn't know it was that type of money, but you knew it was serious money. Yes, you did you do you knew the amount Did you know okay? Do you know this amount as you dropped it or did you find that out later? I dropped bags off with boxes in and then yeah, I saw that at least what I saw in my case It was 328 grand. It was a part payment or something for the delivery of drugs and also you knew all of that information A few strange things were happening Yeah, there was a weird thing where I got followed whether I got followed or not I got there was a helicopter behind me from Harlow to Wolf and Abbey when I was dropping my kids off He should have them on Wednesday night and this happened like after I'd done that After I'd done that thing we're dropping the money off.    I I knew what I was doing committing crime and getting involved in all that But the thing about it is you you've seen every tail tall tail sign You had the opportunity you was oh, I'm just gonna ignore it that right up there It's wild If I see a skin-colored earpiece in anybody ear, I'm not participating in anything else Well, this ain't no this ain't no festival like what you got a earpiece in for no I'm done Y'all do it But not really maybe being oblivious. I wasn't surrounded by a crime and criminals and I was younger watch films, but maybe Okay You jumped in this as a grown man Not as a young and so you you you you you're undercover cop senses was not honed As honed as they should be but you still seen it though Live as to what would really happen and then My So about a week later or two. I'm driving my kids back to their house. Wolf and Abbey. There's like a helicopter behind me And I'm thinking oh, you know, is that what is that? What's that sir?   And I thought I don't know I've stepped away thinking I don't get Not thinking it but probably unconsciously thinking I didn't want to get like resting in front of the kids And then I've asked the police all right anything I can help with and he's like Someone was shouting at him something and he's oh No, no, no, we're looking for someone covered in blood. I thought fair enough later on like years later after I got arrested I Found out it was it was today. It was a Wednesday night I don't know whether exact but it was a Wednesday night used to get my kids around seven o'clock ish The drug was meant to be picked up and someone called it off said something came right here They called off the drug picking up and then he got picked up like a week later So maybe that was my time or it wasn't but then I when I found out the drugs were Picked up and the police have intercepted the van so the bloke started a van and drove off in the fucking van and The immobiliser didn't work so they're back to Jack Knifer lorry and freaking Paulies bloke over on the motorway So if he got away with that because the drugs were in the van the police would have been imagine about that looked Well, you got a stroke of luck They thought she was supposed to do a drop and you wasn't doing a drop and you had your kids and they was They messed it up Hey I've gone on the run with a bit of money that I had I just went around England done a few feet I went down Cornwall for a little while thinking I'd be a beach bum or something there And but I didn't realize how many young kids are in Cornwall. No, okay Like young people the police was like stopping people just searching them like overnight So I ended up going I went up to Like Ashford the way to get to Ireland and then from Ireland I ended up in Thailand and then stayed there for a little while And what is in Thailand? I guess being on the run how anxious or how I hated it Hope you was being careful in Thailand People like people which you know when you're talking amongst people and people don't know Like what I was in prison or something they talk about Thailand and I forget myself. I've been there Oh, we need lovely bloodline.   It's like scummy really so I Was in Thailand for a little while and I'd hated it Hated it and I not I hated it. It's a nice place, but I just was sitting there thinking I'd rather be in prison And sitting out here on my own just like waiting and then a friend of mine I used to give him cash. She didn't have a clue.  So I run The kids speak to the kids you say hello and the kids are all excited and I never really spoke to their mum But their mum come in the phone to tell me that happened and I said about enough. I want to come home And she said I don't want to I don't want to What is this I don't want to convince you know, I like make you do something you don't do but she said Louie my son the eldest son Louie Was looking out the window because my daughter's only a baby and he said where's my dad gone? What's happened to my dad and even see stuff that broke your heart did me my boy? That would break my heart.  We were like inseparable when he was younger So I come home and then I got arrested then you get my seat on the airplane They've said the airplanes landed and everyone stood up Talking some Australian kids all the way there telling him to do this do that having a laugh like nice bloke Some woman there and I'm going to turbulence. Well, that was that was a big one.   Why would they put it? Why would they put that to your head like that? Like you was gonna Like you had something like that. I know it's bad. That's about that time. I didn't know how bad I Knew I was going to get arrested and I knew it might end up in prison But it's still like a glimmer of hope of something because I found out later on Just the soccer agent I shook his hand at the end of the night So I found out later on say took me out of a side door The airport police wanted to take me out the front and I said, I think my kids are outside because I think those come up to pick me up with my mum and that and um The soccer bloke said no, we're taking out a side door and the airport police didn't like it Now I found out later on from my barrister my kids were outside so The the soccer agent I should I know he rested me but I shook his hand and said thanks for that because That's traumatizing for your kids. Imagine coming out with armed police Like my kid I'd have to I don't know. I don't know what I would have said Yeah, and then uh, I got reminded in custody as I'm remind for like 10 months, but a month fin I was in wormwood scrubs a month fin to my sentence my brother died for um suicide and um he I so I looked in to go to the funeral And then security like security looking to letting you go And then I was in my cell and there's like security come to my door and I thought oh, what's this?  I didn't have a clue And then I got put in segregation for like 10 days over my birth like so my brother died in 31st of July my birth is the 10th of august and then he's funeral was like the 14th and then um, I Got um put in segregation. I was in segregation over that time and then I'm asking every day Like what's going on and there's kind of we're not sure we went for the home office come back To understand now Like later on going through my sentence that they're probably just trying to keep my call because they knew I won't get hurt. So yeah I've got made k a got sent to bell martian.   It's just them like scummy things That it's made me who I am today You know, I could have been I could have stayed in that drugs well And I might have ended up an absolute deal.  It was it's segregation Dealing with my brother's thing that was a that was a hard time. I wanted to be out there Maybe to be there with my family as I know, but yeah, and then I wasn't had to go That was it You know, the craziest part of the story is It's could have all been prevented if you would have just listened to your heart If you would just listen to that little voice if you would have just Took into account all of the signs and signals That the that the atmosphere was giving you You could have got up out of there skin color to your piece The officer is talking like two months like trying to fit in too hard By that point it was too late though when the officers are doing all that who believe blah blah blah. It was too late, but I'm glad you on the reformed path now, man. See how little he was like coming up


After a month-long investigation into the death of an inmate, the Bemidji Police Department and Ramsey County Medical Examiner's Office have determined inmate Hardle Sherrell died of pneumonia. Bemidji police officers responded to the Beltrami County Jail on September 2nd, after reports of an inmate not breathing. Life-saving efforts by jail staff were initiated immediately. They included CPR and the use of an AED, although Sherrell was pronounced dead at the scene. Nurse responders and ambulance personnel also responded, but were still unsuccessful in reviving Sherrell. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Hello and welcome to BrandBrain, your monthly online business growth resource, jam-packed full of the very latest tools, techniques, ideas and inspiration to take you from zero visibility to magnetic credibility. So let me ask you a question. What is it that you really want to get out of building your brand? How do you know that the marketing you're doing to build your brand is right for your business?  Although it may feel like that sometimes. I'm guessing that you're building a business to give you and your family the lifestyle that you want to live, right? I'm also guessing that the reason you're here is because you want more, you want more customers and you want to know the quickest, easiest, cheapest ways to get them, yes or no? Well, you know that marketing is important to your business, right? But things are changing so fast now. Marketing isn't what it used to be. So where is the best place to start? What marketing activities should you be focusing on first to get what you really want out of your business? And how will you know if what you are doing is really working?  And I don't just mean in a financial way because it is important that your business allows you the time freedom to enjoy what you want to do too. As I briefly mentioned a few moments ago, the internet is moving so fast with its latest inventions, updates, additions and social media channels. Boy, I mean they're growing really fast. People's buying behavior now is very, very different to the way that they used to make purchases. In the last year, let alone in the last five years or ten years ago, with so many interruptions competing for not just your attention but also for your customer's attention every minute of every day, the way your customers are searching for what you have to buy or what you have to offer is constantly evolving as are their expectations of you along with it and you might have noticed that it used to take on average seven to ten interactions with a prospect in face-to-face meetings and phone calls to convert a prospect into a customer. Well, now you can go from being a complete stranger to a lifetime customer within three or four clicks when you get it right. The point is that marketing is changing. What used to work really, really well may now only get you a mediocre result at best and you might have noticed that. Now, marketing your business can be a minefield if you aren't up to date on what is working right now. So how can you best keep up with what's working when things are changing and moving and evolving so quickly? Well, these are some of the questions that are very valid questions and we get them asked a lot and interestingly, most people in business can answer them. Why not? Well, each business owner has a different story and a different reason for going into business just as your own story is completely unique to you. Perhaps you are an established business with a very clear, crystal clear in fact, outcome as to what you want to achieve and by when. Maybe you fell into running your own business through either inheriting the business or through redundancy, for example, which is far more reactionary. And you feel like a rabbit caught in the headlights where it comes to marketing. And if you do feel like that, then don't worry, you're not alone. Or maybe you are starting a new business and you want to get it right first time. Well, whatever your reason for being here, if it is to grow your business and to attract far more new customers who regularly spend money with you and you can increase your prices, BrandBrain can and will help you. Now, Miles and I created BrandBrain Magazine because, well, if you know us, you know, we just absolutely love what we do. In fact, we worked out the other day that just over the last 10 years alone, and we've been doing this nearly 20 years now, we've spent more than 40,000 hours on marketing activities just in the last 10 years. And that's based on working on eight hours a day, five days a week for 48 weeks of the year. Now, the reality is that we actually spent more like 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week all year round, making that a total of more than 50,000 hours. Now, do you think in that time we might have learned a thing or two about marketing? Well, our clients are certainly happy with the results that we get for them. So I suggest yes. Now, is it possible that we made some mistakes along the way? You bet. In fact, some painful mistakes and we lost over 15,000 at the beginning of this year just by outsourcing our social media to somebody who turned out to be a complete mismatch for our business. You can certainly learn a thing or two, not just about social media, but about outsourcing as well. When you get burned in that way, I can tell you, did we get the result we wanted to every time? No, of course not. But we certainly learned very quickly about what works and what doesn't work because we now know how to track and measure our marketing. And we've been doing that for many years. Now, we can focus only on spending our money, our time, our energy on the things that really work because we've been doing this for so long. Could we share that with you? Absolutely we could. Could it also be possible that we learn a lot of shortcuts along the way? Shortcuts that we could share with you? Well, of course we can. Did we find lots of low cost and no cost marketing methods that can get great results that will help your business to move forward? Yes, we did. Is it possible that we could share all of that knowledge with you without you commissioning our time at £5,000 a day to find out? And believe me, you can talk to people that pay us that amount to work with them one-on-one. Yes, you can get access to that information. And guess what? You could do it all through BrandBrain. Now, BrandBrain is not a quick win, though. We don't believe in, wham, bam, thank you, Sam, type approaches to marketing. So if you do like quick, quick, quick, then BrandBrain is there to build relationships. Now, when we rolled out a poll to over 2,000 business owners on LinkedIn last year, the number one thing that people said they were looking for when they were buying a product of service is trust. So trying to marry your customers on a first date is just not a strategy that we can recommend. Sometimes it will work, but I wouldn't recommend building your whole strategy on it. So instead, we focus on helping you to build a brand that not only is built on trust, but that also is built on great value as well, and we will show you how. You see, when you build a brand on value, you start to become magnetic. You start to find that it takes you less and less energy and money to attract new customers.  Now, would that be good for you? Does it make sense to you that to get to, well, from wanting to live that way, to actually living that way, you need to implement a new strategy. You need to do some new things to get that, because doing the same things you're doing now is only going to get you what you already have. Now, to achieve something different, you need to be doing something different. And what got you here won't necessarily get you there, that's where you want to be. So you must adopt a new strategy. Now, the reason I know so much about this is because my old strategy didn't work for me. In fact, it didn't work for me at all. And I cringe now looking back on it. You see, as an employee, I always told the line, I was a good student at school.  And so I always did what I was told. I believed my art teacher when she told me that I was too different to the other students that I would never get anywhere because I was too different from them. Now, apparently, and I still think about this now, I was too commercial in my way of thinking. And apparently that would never get me anywhere in life. Well, now I completely beg to differ.  So what did I do? Did I rebel? No. Did I tell her to take a hike? No. I've quite easily done that a few times. So what did I do then?  So it became more important to me to be liked than it did for me to be the true me and to give what I was really capable of giving. And well, I just basically held myself back for the next 10 years, always wanting to stand out but being afraid to. Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you look at things, it was right up until the time that I got made redundant just before Christmas 2002. Now, I was absolutely gutted when the company I was working for made 16 of us redundant and closed down the design side of the business. Not a nice thing to happen just before Christmas.  In fact, they'd been trying to niggle me to go and work with them for two years. But I was towing the line. I've been a good girl in my existing job. Fortunately, getting another job was not a problem because I went straight to work for that company. But when 63 of us at this time got called into the big border in six days before Christmas, just a year later in 2003, to be told that the company had been over-trading. It was being forced to close. Well, absolutely devastating news, especially two Christmases in a row. And I loved working there. I thought, oh, God, how on earth am I going to go back and tell my husband that another Christmas is going to be ruined? Let alone face my family. But this is just what the design industry is like, though. You know, the agencies, they take on lots of people when they would be with... I can't speak. The agencies take on lots of people when they win big contracts and spend all the money before they've delivered the contract. Now, I know that's not just in the design industry. That's all over. But then, of course, you become surplus to requirements.  Of course, you know, others left without a job. Again, have you ever found yourself in this position? Really challenging, isn't it? Really wanting to please and trust others at the expense of your own financial security. Well, by then, I had built up a very good personal brand for myself. And again, it didn't take me very long to get another job, which now I know stands for just overbroke. But this was becoming tedious.  Although I had been an employee, I had started to build my own brand within the companies that I worked for. And I always, always kept head of the game outside of the business. So I knew what all of the competitors were doing, more so than the businesses that I was working for. So I toyed with the idea of starting my own business. But I just didn't have the confidence to do it yet. Have you ever felt like that? Well, that was about to change because what happened the next Christmas, you got it. Again, redundancies were on the horizon.  Now it was time to do it for myself. Now, looking back in those first inexperienced days, having now built six of our own businesses and helped thousands of other businesses and perhaps even you, to build theirs. Well, looking back on that now, I cringe a little bit. If only I could go back and advise myself now, eh? Well, I made every mistake in the book, but the worst mistake I ever made was clinging to familiarity. Now I clung to the network of people I had around me because I felt safe there, but they never encouraged me to progress further. You ever felt like that? Well, at the time, I didn't realize because even though I felt like there was an invisible barrier holding me back, I didn't know any different. You see, they didn't want me to be different. They didn't want me to outshine them. They didn't want me to be more successful than them. Like crabs in the barrel, they just kept wanting to pull me back down again.  You know, and this was coming from other business owners.  And so guess what, that made my business. Guess what that made me? You are the sum of the people that you hang around with. So that made me mediocre too. Now, the reason they didn't want to talk about it was because they weren't doing very well in their business. And when I was progressing, it was making them feel bad and lazy if I challenged their thinking. Maybe you've got people around you like that too. So I politely and graciously moved away from that circle. And now I only spend my time with people that I love or would have over to my house in France for the weekend. And that includes our clients. I need to trust the people that I work with. Now, have you ever felt like that? Like you've suppressed some part of yourself, like some of your most valuable qualities have been suppressed because it served other people or even particularly someone else. Maybe you've done that in the past. Perhaps you're doing it now. Things can change in a heartbeat if you take action. But thinking back, you probably wasn't scared of trying new things as a child.      Not gonna try that again. You didn't. You fell over again and again and kept getting up and kept getting up until you got up and stayed up. Well, there's a surprising similarity between that and building your business. The difference is in the strategy that you could have now. The strategy that will help you to continue to do this and help you to step out of your comfort circle to embrace a new group of people. A group of people that you can learn from who have already done the falling over for you that have fallen over and got back up and fallen over and got back up again and they learned how to be great consistently. Now, you know, you've already invested thousands of pounds maybe in your business but these people have genuinely spent a lot of money falling down and standing back up and they are now really visible. Now, you know, they can help you to not only keep up with your competitors but excel them so much that they can't keep up with you. Now, if you want to stop swimming in the seat of sameness and go from zero visibility to magnetic credibility where there just aren't enough hours or people in the day to answer all the inquiries that come pouring in, then you need to get some help. Help from people who know what they are doing. Help from people who are just like you and share the same values as you. The only difference is they have a different skill set to you. A skill set that you need to enable you to plug that knowledge gap. The skill set that you might be missing in marketing and business growth enabling you to do what you are best at. Now, just one issue of BrandBrain Magazine is the equivalent of having 10 super successful marketing directors, brand strategy specialists, SEO experts, social media marketers, video marketing gurus, content writing, amazing people, mindset experts, business advisors, all these people helping you to grow your business and your brand in a way that is working in industry right now. Not 10 years ago, not even a year ago. This week, you know, that's thousands of pounds worth of information for less than the price of three star butt of coffees. Honestly, the experts at BrandBrain are the people that you need to start including in your network. Now, I guarantee you that if all you did was follow just one article a day from the magazine during the working week and you implemented what you learned into your business, you wouldn't know what to do with all of the customers that you've got coming to you in six months. Very nice problem to have. And the reason we know this is because we've tested it on other businesses including our own. Now, hey, listen, I could talk to you all day about BrandBrain Magazine because Miles and I are so passionate if you haven't guessed already about what it can do for your business. If you just put your trust in us and let us help you. Now, we've packed it with so much value that you're gonna absolutely love what we've created for you and we sincerely hope that you will want to continue that journey with us and subscribe to the monthly magazines because every day we're finding new things that we can share with you in next month's magazine. So I genuinely hope that you choose to buy BrandBrain and include us in your circle of influence. All you need to do is press one of the buy now buttons on this page and you'll know them because they're green. You'll be able to start reading the magazine with just a few minutes of signing up. It's sipples. So do let us know how you get on.  You share your results with other people and they'll ask you where you found out about this stuff and you can tell them that it was BrandBrain that helped you to do it and we want you to share this magazine with other people too because we know it can help so many people. So buy it now and I'll look very much forward to hearing your business growth success stories soon.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com coming at you with a little 1819 chronicles basketball fat pack break random team 2 Whole point of this break, of course, we're giving away six one and one basketball spots We actually have to do just one more of these if you're watching live and then that unlocks Panini one and one Which is a half case break. I think from a fresh case. I'll double check that but I'm pretty pretty certain that is So as always we're gonna do the break itself first Then we'll re-randomize everybody's name then see who gets what at the end Big thanks everybody right here for making this happen. All the teams are in So let's do the break first and the dice roll for the break will be snake eyes one and two easy All right, Josh down to Sean and obviously different dice roll for the giveaways Snake eyes one and two All right, there's Celtics down to Sixers I meant Celtics down to Sixers not Celtics on jazz All right, here's the first half of the list right here Jimmy with the Grizzlies We got Sean with the Pelicans. It could be some interesting things happening here. You never know. All right, in fact Maybe there is a little Luka dodges mojo because remember we're doing 1819 chronicles basketball, so I Had to remind myself Pelicans and Grizzlies don't matter in this sorry It's Sean Maddock and the Hawks along with Louie and the Mavs There you go Lou. We got Boston at The Celtics at Dallas right now Luka don't just hit a nice three Luka don't you it's gonna pull. No, he's gonna pass deep three for Hardaway off the back End of the third quarter Dallas up 80 to 76 Luka dodges what a shot by him. I only saw that at the corner of my eye Is that right? Prism in March feels a little early doesn't it? It's Jaren Jackson jr. Deandre Aiton's pretty solid too. So is SGA This guy just needs to stay healthy Jalen Brunson. We want Luka Andre All right. Well, we got SGA for the Clippers Clippers edition Sean Maddock We got your number one overall pick in 1819 Deandre Aiton who's also been playing sons have been playing some good basketball, too That goes to Kelly and the triple J that goes to Jimmy All right, so important thing, of course Sean and Jake and everyone in between top six after three Will be in one and one one Two and three after three top six. So from seven down to thirty sad times Good news is though. We have to do one more of these. So if you feel like trying again Jasper's case breaks comm all right top six. Congrats to you winners Kelly Dimitri Kelly Dimitri Sean Zach There you go. You're in one and one and we got to do one more. We'll unlock that break I'm Joe. I'll see you for that one a little bit later tonight. Bye. Bye


The Minnesota Chamber made a stop in Brainerd today as part of their statewide policy tour. Our Sarah Winkelman shares the key points on the Chamber's 2018 legislative agenda. The Minnesota Chamber statewide policy tour is making 12 stops throughout Minnesota to best prepare for the 2018 legislative session. Get around the state here directly from employers about the issues that they care about and make sure when we go to the legislature we're going with a consensus agenda. It's well informed and we understand what's foremost on employers minds. Today issues related to the workforce shortage were discussed at length. For the past 15 years the state of Minnesota has been losing more people domestically than adding so what that means is more people are moving out of Minnesota than moving in from other states so that's a challenge for us. Also a top concern for Minnesotans is the high business taxes. We have a lot of work to do to be more competitive and we will be pushing with the legislature and talking with them non-stop about how to be more competitive on tax rates. That's always a top concern for employers it might even be more so this year with the federal tax changes. And with many other changes on the way in the political landscape. Governor's race, Senate races, legislative races, it's a political year and that'll dominate a lot of what's going to happen. But even with some uncertainty there are areas the Minnesota Chamber is happy to keep as it is. We are renowned for this fabulous reliable, smart, capable workforce. It's one of our greatest assets and we want to keep that going. Along with a strong creative workforce. Minnesotans are very smart and very capable of developing new things, goods, services that helps us maintain a competitive edge and a very robust economy comparative to the rest of the nation. With this state ranked fourth in the nation for patents per capita. It's always a wonderful opportunity to hear what's going on at the state level and how as a group of businesses we might be able to affect change. Change to create a stable community. A lot of times when you don't put those additional burdens on businesses they invest back into their communities and back into their people and if we can help bring that message to the state legislature that's exactly what we want to do. Reporting in Brainerd, Sarah Winkleman, Lakeland News. The statewide policy tour will make a stop in Bemidji on Thursdays. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


OK, let's welcome the next speaker, Tom, who's going to present us his project, HTPX. Thank you. OK, so I'll just start by checking the mic volume. Am I OK at the back? Yes? Cool. OK, good. OK, so my name's Tom Christie. I'm the author of a whole bunch of different open source projects, including an API framework called Django REST framework, a tool for building documentation from Markdown called MKDocs. More recently I've been spending a whole lot of time in the Async.io landscape, building an Async.io web server called Yivicorn, an Async.io micro web framework called Starlet. Most recently of all, spending a whole bunch of time working on this HTTPX, which has just about now gotten to the stage where it's kind of ready for everybody to start using it. So what is HTTPX? HTTPX is an HTTP client, just like requests. So you can use it for downloading web pages or interacting with APIs or anywhere where you're issuing HTTP requests over the network. And it should look pretty familiar to anybody here who's used the request library, which I guess would be most of you. We've got to the point now in the development where we've pretty much got feature parity with requests. And that's a lot of ground to cover. So for instance, if you want to be able to seamlessly just present the user with the unicode text of the response that's been returned, all of the things that you've got to do under the hood include things like, okay, well, the bytes that we got over the wire might be compressed because HTTP has a mechanism for content compression. So first of all, you've got to figure out whether they're compressed or not. And if they are decompressed it, and at that point, you've still got a whole load of bytes on the wire. So you've got to figure out, well, what's the character set that we're going to decode that text into? That might be present in one of the HTTP headers. If it's not, then you're going to have to find some way of figuring out what the character set probably is. So doing all of that stuff gracefully, handling redirects gracefully, different HTTP redirect status codes have different behaviors. They might change the methods. Some of them preserve the body when you're issuing the redirect. Some of them don't. Being able to handle basic and digest authentication. There might be authentication in the URL itself because that can contain basic authentication credentials. If you get redirected away from the origin that you first made the request to, then you need to be stripping the authentication. There's a lot of ground to cover. But there wouldn't really be much point to this if what we were doing was just building a new package and trying to match requests, like for like. So the big motivation for HTTPX has been to do all of that, but also introduce a bunch of new functionality. The first big piece of that is to provide both an async capable HTTP client and a standard synchronous API, all in one same package with a coherent API between those two different cases. HTTPX includes support both for HTTP 1.1 and also HTTP 2. I'm pretty sure it's the first, well, yeah, I think it's the first Python client library to really do that. It's got the ability to make requests directly to a web framework rather than actually sending requests out over the wire, so you can plug it directly into a flask application or something like this. We've got some nice sensible behavior about strict timeouts, which we'll come to, and the whole thing is fully type annotated all the way through. All of that together with reams of documentation and almost 100% test coverage. And there's more to come as well. So HTTPX, as I've said, should look pretty familiar if you've used requests. We've gone to great lengths to retain API compatibility with requests wherever possible. There's a documentation page specifically for what differences are there between the two in places where we've chosen to make a change. You ought to be able to migrate over from one to the other just by going and having a quick scan through that guide and switching anything over that's apparent there. But mostly not. A couple of examples of places where we differ. And we've got a slightly more constrained streaming API. So with requests, it's actually quite easy to inadvertently use a streaming response and not realize that the way that you've done that has left the connection hanging open at the end of it. So a little bit more constrained there. But we use different naming instead of request.session. We preferred HTTPX.client. And there's some differences at some of the lower levels of the API as well. Once you start getting into stuff that's more really implementation details, methods on the client class and so on. So fully type annotated. That's both at the layer of the public API but also all the way through the code base.  So if you get type hinting in some IDEs and all of the APIs are nice and clear and explicit, there's no going and having a look at something going, well, does that thing take a string or does it take something that's string-like? Or so on. It's also given us a really high degree of confidence in our own code base. I think HTTPX would have taken a lot longer to build if we hadn't had strict type checking all the way through, I think. And some of the bits where we've made large refactoring earlier on in the age of the project I think would have been really, really difficult to do without that. Well, timeouts by default, so the timeout policy in HTTPX is to always have timeouts enabled by default so that rather than being able to, if you inadvertently make a request and you haven't set any timeouts and the network hangs, then your script is just left hanging indefinitely, you've got a five-second timeout by default and if you want to raise that or remove that, then you can. There's lots of fine-grained controls on that. You can control different aspects of the timeout. So for example, you can allow long connection times, but reasonable timeout periods if it hangs whilst you're downloading a response and you can control the timeouts on the connection pool and things like this. But we try to provide a really simple API at the basic level and then allow you to expand into some of the more complex options if you need to. One of the, absolutely one of the bigger things, the async support. So, Threaded Concurrency is not very good at performing lots and lots of network operations at the same time. You're kind of bounded by maybe having 10 or 20 threads running on the machine and that's as many concurrent requests as you'll be able to make. With async.io, the concurrency model is much less resource-intensive, so you can have thousands of concurrent tasks running easily and that allows you to do stuff that Python hasn't traditionally been very good at making large numbers of concurrent HTTP requests. We've kind of been having to catch up with other environments such as Go and Node, which have performed much better in this regard, but we're actually really kind of coming quite a long way along now. So, async.io is one of the async frameworks for Python. It's the one that's there in the Stoodlib, but it's not the only one now, so there's at least a couple of others. There's one called Curio and there's one which is getting a lot of development called Trio. Trio is exceptionally well-designed. It's motivated by this particular design constraint that its author has been kind of one of the architects of, I guess you would say, called Structured Concurrency. And one of the things that's a bit difficult is async.io and Trio and Curio. They're all completely incompatible, so you either have to pick one or the other. At the moment, of course, async.io, because it's in the Stoodlib, has the widest ecosystem support out of any of the options, but Trio is really worth looking at and a lot of the design work that's been going on to Trio, people are trying to pull down into async.io as well. The second of the really big features is adding HTTP.2 support. So, HTTP.2 is a big update to the HTTP protocol. That switches from using, whereas HTTP.1.1 has always been text over the wire, so if you go and inspect the raw bytes, you'd be able to just go and inspect the headers and see what's happening. HTTP.2 is a binary protocol, and that's allowed them to do some things that can improve the performance, such as header compression, and minimizing the size of the requests and the responses. But probably bigger than that is what's called stream multiplexing. So, with HTTP.1.1, when you're making concurrent requests from one particular server to another, you have to use one TCP stream for each individual request. With HTTP.2, it has a mechanism whereby you just open up a single TCP stream and you can send almost as many different requests and responses along that single connection as you want. And those two things mean that HTTP.2 has both lower latency sometimes, latency being the time it takes from when you've made the request until you get the response back, the lower latency being because you're less frequently having to establish a whole new connection in order to get your response back, and it also means you can get much higher throughput to be able to make more requests at the same time. So, this is a bit of an example of the stream multiplexing. In this example, it's a web browser that's making the request. It's going off and it's fetching a web page. The web page has got a bunch of JavaScript and CSS associated with it. In the 1.0.1 case, each of the two other resources that we're downloading is then downloaded sequentially. And in the HTTP.2, we can go and download them in parallel over the same connection. Now, it's a slight simplification because actually in HTTP.1.1, you'll tend to open up more than a single connection. But even so, if you're downloading lots of resources at the same time, this is kind of what it ends up looking like. HTTP.2 is significantly more complex than HTTP.1. So, for the moment, we've decided that the best user experience is to not enable it by default. We don't have any big outstanding bugs for it that I can see at the moment. But I think there may still be some cases where servers might be less robust or, you know, it gives us a little bit of a chance just to start battle-testing it before we decide to flip the switch and say, yes, we're happy enough that the user experience on this is always going to be good enough that we'll just keep it on by default unless you want to switch it off. And presumably at some point in the future, we'll end up doing that. So, some use cases for HTTPS. And the first one's really simple. Everywhere that you're using requests at the moment, right? It's a fully-featured alternative. If there's something that you can do in requests that you're not currently able to do in HTTPS, raise that as an issue, those things are going to be pretty limited around the edges at the moment. You know, there's, I think, event hooks. We don't yet support. I can't remember. And, of course, request has got a little bit better ecosystem support. You know, so, for example, custom authentication classes. More people have written those for requests so far than they have for HTTPS. Yeah, SOPs for proxy support is available in requests. We haven't yet got that. And, yes. Next use case, making parallel requests. Make it using the async client variants to make multiple HTTPS requests at the same time. So in this example, I'm using Trio as the async framework. And starting up 120 requests to Wikipedia to download all of the Wikipedia pages on the years from, I'll say 100 requests from the years 1920 through to today. Don't expect this to be completely magic. Although I say they run in parallel, you're not, you know, if you were running these sequentially, it won't actually take 100 times longer than this one will run. It will be faster, or it will be slower whichever way round I've said it. Can't remember. But you've got to, there are other factors at play. You know, you may be constrained by the network bandwidth that's available full stop anyway. You might be constrained by the server resources on the other side. So it's not going to just be magically the number of times that you're issuing parallel requests faster than.  Also, really, that's something that I ought to go and write some, do some really good investigation of and write some blog posts and case studies. So I'm hoping to do that in the future. What we got next? Oh, yeah, same thing. Same thing, but add HTTP to into the mix. And why you might do that is because, as we've talked about, performance benefits, sensible thing to do. Say you're writing a web spidering tool and you're using the async requests to get really good performance out of that. Try it with just HTTP1 to start with and then add HTTP2 into the mix. You'll also want to check whether the HTTP version that the server has responded with really is HTTP2. It might not support it. You can look on response.httpversion and that will give you the actual version that was used in the response. Next use case. Okay, so we talked about making requests in parallel. One of the use cases here doesn't look within the particular code block like you're making requests in parallel. When you're using HTTPX with one of the newer async web frameworks that's out there, maybe Sanic, FastAPI, Starlet, Cort and AII HTTP, although they've got their own built-in clients. The endpoint code that you're looking at will just be a, generally, will just be a single sequential flow of code. However, your web server is handling multiple requests at the same time because you're using an async framework with an async HTTP client inside that, you're not blocking an entire thread every time you're making an outgoing request. So your framework will be able to support a far higher throughput than if you were using a WISGI framework such as Flask and using requests to issue those requests. Another use case that I think's gonna start to be really interesting, don't expect to read that on the side, it's just to kind of give you a feel for, oh, okay, on the right-hand side, that's an example of a proxy server written using HTTPX and ASGI proxy server. And what I think's really exciting about being able to start to build up things like gateway services is, I think Python really starts to hit a sweet spot between productivity and performance. Typically, for this sort of thing in the past, you've wanted to use Node if you want to do this sort of thing or maybe go. What else have we got? Plug-ins directly into web apps. So, yes, you can direct your HTTP requests to a WISGI or an ASGI app rather than actually sending them out over the network. That's useful for using it as a test client. It's also useful for writing. Sometimes you don't actually want to be sending out requests, you just want to be simulating it. Say if you're in your staging environment or when you're testing locally, it's really useful to be able to stub out, mocks there and switch depending on the environment. One of the technical challenges in this has been how do you build an API that supports both the synchronous variant and the async variant without just copying everything in two separate sets of code bases. We initially started out with this kind of bridging approach whereby everything under the hood was actually running async and for the synchronous variant you just run this little kind of shim layer over the top and you run your event loop behind the scenes underneath that. Turns out there were some issues with that which were pretty intractable. So we've ended up switching, well, we're in the process of switching over to a slightly different approach. We've got something in the interim that's working really well. So I'm in a bit of a rush now but some of the components that we've used to build this up, there's two packages in particular that are absolutely outstanding pieces of work, H11 and H2 which deal with the core HTTP parsing for us. At the moment, so requests under the hood uses the URL lib3 package to actually do the now send a network request. At the moment our synchronous client also uses URL URL lib3 when it's sending requests and the async client uses our own engine that we've developed from scratch. The biggest thing that we're changing at the moment is getting rid of that and making sure that we're using the same engine in both places. So I've ended up rushing a little bit towards the end. So quick look at some of the other stuff that's on the horizon. Streaming multi-part uploads. So one of the things that's difficult to do with multi-part uploads is typically say with requests it will pull the whole, if you're doing a file upload and you're using multi-parts, it will pull that whole file into memory and then send the request. And it needs to do that because it might get a redirect response and it might need to resend it. We've taken care of how are we going to be able to provide streaming but rewindable multi-part uploads. HTTP3 support, Jeremy Lane is doing stacks of work in this in Python and I think yeah, that's something that we're going to be looking at in the future almost certainly. One of the other big things that we're looking at as well is taking our core networking component and isolating that into a really, really tightly scoped independent package that just makes network requests, doesn't do any of the clients smart, doesn't have any request or response models over it but it's just the data primitives. Here's how you make a request, here's how you get a response and being able to do that both in the sync case and in the async case and in the async case supporting async IO, supporting trio, hopefully in the future supporting curio, maybe supporting twisted as well. So that we've got this one really tightly scoped based package that then the client can sit on top of and I think we're probably, all right, yes.