CRG: What do you believe are the most relevant issues currently facing the county right now? And what would be your six month plan to tackle those?

Tracy Thompson; I think the first thing for me is poverty. We have above average poverty. We have above average crime. We have above average homelessness. And those three things are all interrelated. If you don't have a place to live, it's hard to get a job and therefore, what do you resort to? So my first priority is to address the homelessness problem. I know some people have said, just ship them away. Well, that's not a solution. That's just moving the problem somewhere else.

So I've been researching some tiny home communities like we have around Foundry Village and the Parker's Place thing. I think there's an opportunity here to create some home community, small communities that are particularly targeted towards seniors, our fastest growing homeless population, and families who have intergenerational homelessness. There's some county assets that we can use to build those tiny homes and the actual building of those tiny homes would help provide jobs for people who are learning trades through like workforce and some of the other organizations here. So it's actually addressing those immediate needs.

Longer term, I think we need to really see how much federal and state money we can bring in here because since we've lost the ONC timber receipts, we have not recovered. And instead of looking backwards, I think we need to look forwards as how we can utilize funds to build a sustainable future for the county.