FAQ

Corry is dedicated to keeping Emeryville safe, affordable, and prosperous for everyday citizens while making sure federal agencies and big corporations can’t walk all over us.

She wants to remove surveillance tech that spies on us and sells our data to ICE. She’ll fight to make living here more affordable by building more housing and going after landlords who charge too much for rent. Corry wants to focus city resources on crime prevention rather than punishment. She aims to support small local businesses so they can compete with big chains. All while keeping city council productive and drama-free.

Learn more about her plans at corry4emeryville.com.

Surveillance and public safety are always tricky. The biggest problem is there’s no way to only surveil criminals without also spying on innocent people. Our families, neighbors, friends, and visitors are all caught in the net. In fact, it’s the vast majority of the data they store and sell.

Then we contend with who has access to that data. Our license plate readers (ALPR) and other cameras aren’t only visible to EPD. Flock and other big tech companies like it sell that data to whoever pays for it. That includes ICE, big corporations, debt collectors, and even individual stalkers. Not to mention all the breaches and unauthorized access to that data.

It creates a bigger safety risk to all of us — especially those most vulnerable — for the sake of catching maybe one or two more petty criminals per year. All while taking a chunk of our city budget to keep it running. We need to put an end to it.

Read more on Corry’s Emeryville Issues page.

The biggest expense we face every month is housing. Rent in Emeryville is out of control. We need to stick to our goals of building more affordable housing, while simultaneously squeezing big corporate landlords to play fairly. Corry is in favor of tactics like vacancy taxes, rent control, or even freezing rent to support our neighbors and help them get through our current economic struggles.

Corry also wants to work on making it more affordable to own a home in Emeryville, including grappling with high HOA dues and fees at assisted living facilities. We need fewer investors profiteering off struggling renters and more opportunities for housing stability.

Another place a lot of our money goes is groceries. While our small city doesn’t have much power in international supply chains and federal farm subsidies, we can empower local services like ECAP to help put food on the table for our most vulnerable neighbors. Corry would also advocate for more people using those services. They’re fantastic and can really help fill in the days between paychecks.

While we’re lucky to have local stores who don’t use surveillance pricing and jack up prices, the big chains do. They know we’re hungry enough to pay more. Big national chains charge us in the cities more to keep their stores in rural areas and other states open. We need to support small local businesses and make those big chains pay more to help balance these things out.

Read more on Corry’s Emeryville Issues page.

I love the potential of getting a hospital. It means good stable jobs, local access to care, and tax revenue. That said, we have to tread carefully planning construction around all our other city priorities. We must make sure we don’t concede too much control to Sutter without them paying their fair share to do business here and committing to staying for the long-term. Traffic, employee housing, and public safety are all major concerns we need answers about.

At the most recent presentation from Sutter, I was disappointed to see their proposal hadn’t changed much. They sought our feedback in previous outreach and we gave them plenty, but they came back to waste our time with sales pitches for a proposal that still doesn’t really address our residents’ concerns. They need to make some bigger moves toward our common goals, and stop wasting our time asking for feedback they’re just going to ignore.

To make a long and winding story short, Corry was born in New Jersey. She moved to Phoenix to attend art school, then all over the country to follow hers and her wife’s careers to Tucson, Las Vegas, Baltimore, then finally The Bay Area. She fell in love with it, especially the East Bay, and made it her mission to put down roots here.

Finally, after the pandemic brought interest rates down enough, Corry was able to qualify for a 1 bedroom condo in Emeryville. This was her first non-rental home. She took such joy in meeting her neighbors and exploring what she still hopes will be her forever city.

Shortly after moving in, Corry attended her first HOA meeting. She introduced herself and asked a few questions. One of the board members pulled her aside and asked if she’d ever consider joining a committee, and she did. A year or so later, Corry was appointed, then later re-elected as a director on the HOA board. Since then, she’s joined more committees including co-founding their popular landscape committee.

Around the time Corry moved to Emeryville, she also joined the city’s bike and pedestrian committee for a walking tour and added feedback as a pedestrian and public transit user. She’s also participated in a few shoreline cleanups and other city events. She works full-time, participates in small community mutual aid activities, and takes care of her disabled spouse occasionally, so she appreciates that Emeryville’s Public Works team makes it so she can pitch in flexibly.

(Corry applied to join the Parks committee but hasn’t heard anything back yet, so maybe they’ll get back to her soon. Rogue — Corry’s pet chihuahua — has some notes for the Christie Dog Park.)

Corry works on the tech team of Gibbs Mura LLP, an Oakland-based law firm that sues big tech companies, banks, insurers, and other powerful corporations on behalf of regular citizens. You may have heard about some of their efforts against Meta, TikTok, and YouTube in the news recently. They also pursue data privacy cases against companies like Flock and Motorola. While not a lawyer, Corry helps enable their legal teams with automations, data management, digital marketing, and website development so they can reach their thousands of clients on a given case.

Before that, Corry managed a team of web developers at a large international clothing brand based in San Francisco. In 2023, just before her 8 year work anniversary, her whole department was wiped out by a massive layoff. She still has all the management skills and experience she gained from these roles, but the job market isn’t what it used to be. So Corry chose a role she’s passionate about, made difficult personal budgeting cuts, and leans on her community to keep her home here and survive. Lots of people in Emeryville have to do the same, and she’s grateful she can.

Corry wants to bring her skills in team leadership, project management, technical expertise, and communication to Emeryville City Council. The council had a solid group when she moved here in many ways, but certain decisions made it clear to her there was a lack of healthy technology-skepticism on the team. Combined with the time wasted by drama and delays in decision-making, our city’s ambitious and virtuous projects have lagged. Corry wants to, at the very least, take a seat that will stop being a bottleneck for progress. She aspires to quickly learn what she can from our talented city staff, provide them with clear direction, respond to them in a timely manner, and lead the council toward greater productivity.

Yes, as soon as possible. Corry stands with renters and tenant unions in favor of rent control and building safe, sustainable, attractive, dense housing.

Learn more: https://www.seiu1021.org/post/rent-control-all-repeal-costa-hawkins

Obviously, Corry will focus on listening and learning first. This is her first role in public service, so I plan to approach it with humility and adjust my plans based on new information. That said, I won’t dodge the direct question.

First and foremost, I want to unblock our stalled construction projects on housing and road safety. Many Emeryville renters pay more than half their wages just to keep a roof over their heads, which is unacceptable. The best way to help long-term is by building more housing. There are other ways to ease the burden on renters I’d like to pursue as well, but building is essential.

Next, I’d want to focus on securing our city’s status as a sanctuary city in more than just words. Our actions need to meet those words by ending our contract with Flock Security, removing cameras from our streets, and ensuring the city never again makes the naive mistake of trusting surveillance tech firms that view our families and neighbors as nothing more than dollar signs to spy on for profit. These cameras do not prevent crime. The data they collect is held insecurely so any basic level hacker can access them. Both local police and the company itself has broken laws allowing ICE, the FBI, and other hostile groups access to it.

On a similar note, my third priority would be to focus the city budget on services that actually work to prevent crime and other public safety problems. It’s an easy political win to fan the flames of fear-mongering social media and our national news orgs propagandize us with constantly. Corporate lobbyists and expensive consultants thrive off that fear, but I’m not afraid of my neighbors. None of us should be. We have wonderful people here. We need to keep them housed, their families fed, their children educated, and protect them from the real threats coming from wage theft, fraudsters, and corporate greed.

Next I’d focus on small local businesses who have a lot of challenges anywhere in the Bay Area, and also some unique ones here. I want to enable city services to provide more consistent support for local businesses. There are shrink issues police can’t truly help with where we can find creative solutions that don’t just waste more of a business owner’s precious time in reporting and dealing with insurance and other bureaucratic nonsense.

Finally, I’d like to see how we can work with Sutter to get them on board with our residents’ many concerns and how they need to contribute to our city if they want to build here. It’ll take a ton of resources and effort by city staff to deal with this development, and I think we’ll need to get a lot more information and solidify some commitments from them before we get too deep into the project.

Police budgets are over-inflated everywhere in the U.S. and it’s brought us to this point where we see weapons and tools normally seen in warzones and prisons turned on innocent civilians just living our lives. I’ve lived in multiple cities in the Bay Area and Emeryville police are among the best of them, but no police force needs a tank, surveillance drones, or a huge network of AI powered cameras. We can certainly tighten our belts there. It serves us to reign it in.

I’m aware stating this makes me the target of one of the most powerful lobbies in American cities: the police union. Their interest is entirely in bloating police budgets in an unsustainable endless growth pattern. It may encourage Flock, Palantir, and other evil surveillance tech corporations to target me if I’m loud enough. But someone has to do it. Our city workers and the services they provide need those resources for things that actually help our families.

Though I’d rather not cut other services, if necessary I’d focus on where we’re outsourcing work beyond city borders. Expensive contractors, excessive tech licensing fees, nonsensical return-to-office mandates, and I’d listen to city staff to hear other ways to make their jobs easier and more productive.

Emeryville’s art is a huge part of our identity as a growing residential city. It breathes amazing life into our daily lives where previously only flat warehouse walls and utilitarian elements existed. Yes, the arts are a priority for me. They won’t take precedence over crisis management, safety, or affordability, but it’s definitely a necessity. I want to include creativity, design sense, and expression in anything we build together here.

And, relatedly, I want zero generative AI to take the place of funds we can put into artists’ pockets.

Absolutely. I’m likely the most transparent public figure ever, blogging the most embarrassing ideas I’ve had since I was a teenager. If the press has questions they can ask respectfully and in a non-harassing way (a necessary qualifier these days), I’d be happy to have the opportunity to give my perspective. Obviously, I’ll be constrained by law not to reveal some things.