As the holiday shopping season gets underway and Occupy Oakland looks to regroup in Oakland, it's a good time check out KQED reporter Krissy Clark's wide ranging interview with Oakland Mayor Jean Quan. The two of them talked by phone last Wednesday.
In addition to plugging a new gift card that can be used at multiple local Oakland businesses and reflecting on how to get the economy going, Quan talked about the effort by some to recall her and the impact of the Occupy movement. Here are some of the highlights:
A poll showed your approval rating at 16%. Does that affect your ability to govern?
This is a very tough job I have I can’t worry about the day to day polls…it’s we just have too much at stake. I haven’t had the time really to sit down with my family and talk about the long term politics. We just want, the holiday season is particularly important to any city. We want to get the economy going to as well as we can to help all the residents of the city.
Are you taking the effort to recall you seriously?
I think I have to take everything seriously. I hear that sour grapes of certain candidates that lost in the past might be funding the signatures. I think that’s a shame. What I’m hearing is even some business people who might not have liked what happened in occupy, they’re happy now, they want the city to get back to business. A recall can be very divisive and it can be very time, energy and money consuming, so most business people I’ve talked to have said they’re not supporting the recall.
What are some of the ways you’re trying to drum up support for downtown merchants in Oakland?
As you know the Oakland economy has been pretty hard hit like most of the Bay Area, and the downtown demonstrations have particularly hit our downtown merchants, even Chinatown which is nowhere near downtown tells us that they had 40% drop off.
So what we’re hoping to do is remind people that Oakland has 40 unique and distcint neighborhoods and invite them to come.