FAQ

When ICE started terrorizing our cities after the 2024 election, I was afraid. Instead of running away, I decided to find ways a laid-off technical manager could use her skills to protect our sanctuary city.

For years before that, friends and neighbors told me I should run because I was so passionate about Emeryville and had a different perspective from the sitting council. I love Emeryville, and I love our city’s many objectives, but a lot of disorganization and drama seems to get in the way.

Once I saw the Flock contract and how they ignored all the evidence against this type of surveillance (despite my public comments about it), it set me on my path to try and make sure our city doesn’t get fleeced again. Or at the very least that my campaign can raise awareness about these issues and whoever does take the seats does a better job addressing them.

Learn more about her plans at corry4emeryville.com.

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 Public Safety and Surveillance Capitalism 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.

Read my deep dive about the Sutter Hospital Proposal for more.

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.

I care a lot about maintaining respectful professional relationships with people I disagree with. We usually agree on what we want our results to be, but just need to compromise and communicate effectively to get there in ways we can all get on board with.

Working as a manager for large and small companies with big fiery personalities arguing about what’s most important every day has taught me how to choose my battles, find alignment in seas of chaos and contention, and act on those alignments in incremental ways. This builds trust and makes it easier for a wide variety of perspectives to start seeing a common vision more clearly.

A few things. Obviously, the rent is too high. A big part of my platform is working to improve transparency, affordability, and tenant bargaining power in our city to help with that. Growing families who need to size-up may actually be able to stay if we can improve this.

Another issue is our schools. Emeryville needs to focus more of our efforts on providing more inclusive, smarter funded, and prioritized schools for local kids. Too many parents I know here send their kids to other places for various reasons, and we need to do a better job listening to them.

Finally, I think our continued improvements to street safety and our parks will help in big dollar-efficient ways. Few things make a parent’s life easier than knowing their kids can play, skate, shoot hoops, or engage in other healthy community activities safely without spending a dime.

(Emeryville’s General Plan) Yes, but I’d like a few additions.

I’d like to strengthen our commitment to being a sanctuary city for everyone. Federal cuts and attacks hitting us over the last several years needs to be answered by constructing our own safety nets. We can’t rely on those larger systems to protect our most vulnerable residents. ICE watches, mutual aid, and other community organizing we’ve responded with is inspiring, but we can do more as a city to bolster those services and protections.

Smart housing policy to both build more of it and stabilize cost of living as best as we can in the near term.

I want us to focus on more creative and effective solutions for public safety than just continuing to bloat our police budget.

I’d like to add more ways for pedestrians and bikes to cross the train tracks, highways, and other difficult barriers. I know this falls under some of the other points, but I’d be more explicit about that.

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.)

I work 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 our efforts against Meta, TikTok, and YouTube in the news recently. They also pursue data privacy cases against companies like Flock Safety and Motorola.

While not a lawyer, I help enable their legal teams with automations, data management, digital marketing, and website development so we can reach our thousands of clients on a given case.

Before that, I managed a team of web developers at Gap Inc. In 2023, just before my 8 year work anniversary, my whole department was wiped out by a massive layoff. I still have all the management skills and experience I gained from these roles, but the job market isn’t what it used to be. So I chose a role I’m passionate about, made difficult personal budgeting cuts, and lean on my community to keep my home and survive. Lots of people in Emeryville have to do the same, and I’m grateful I can.

I want to bring my skills in team leadership, project management, technical expertise, and communication to Emeryville City Council. The council had a solid group when I moved here in many ways, but certain decisions made it clear 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. I want to, at the very least, take a seat that will stop being a bottleneck for progress. I aspire to quickly learn what I can from our talented city staff, provide them with clear direction, pay them fairly, respond to them in a timely manner, and lead the council toward greater productivity.

Yes, as soon as possible. I stand 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.

In short, nowhere.

So-called artificial intelligence tools destroy jobs, rob from human creatives, and produce inaccurate, bigoted, shoddy results. I don’t believe any part of our city’s budget should go toward supporting these products or paying for prompt/query tokens.

If individual workers want to use an LLM to help them spell check, interpret and format data, or handle other tasks it’s suited for, I won’t stop them as long as they take responsibility for checking all the results for accuracy, bias, and quality before submitting them. Example: I pay for my own GitHub subscription even though I frequently use it for work, because I find it helps my productivity.

When I moved to the Bay Area, Barbara Lee was my representative. Before I even got here, I knew I liked her for her lone opposition to the War in Iraq. She consistently stood up and did the right thing, even if she had to do it by herself, and I really admire that. When she represented me, she continued to do everything I’d want as my rep without me needing to badger her with letters and calls. When she stepped down, she endorsed Lateefah Simon, and I was sad to see her go but really liked Simon once I got to see her in action. I still support them both today in their roles as Mayor of Oakland and my Congressional rep.

I also really admire Elizabeth Warren. While she’s less popular than other politicians I support like Bernie Sanders and AOC, I loved her “I’ve got a plan for that” approach to policy-centered, facts-based, and effective legislation work. I try to emulate that spirit by being more transparent and detailed in my stances than most city council members. Her agency, the CFPB has saved millions of Americans from fraud, corporate abuse, and other unfair rip-off practices. I hope to be as good at actually getting good policy on the books and helping people as she’s been in her career.

Right now, I love the idea of AOC/Walz 2028 (or vice versa), but it’s too far away to really call yet. Plus, Walz already said he won’t do it again. But we need someone like him to bring some pragmatic midwestern no-nonsense leftist swagger to balance AOC’s sharp NYC big city vibe.

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.

I’m not a religious person. I have my own thing going on, but I’ll use language I learned from being raised in an Episcopalian Christian household to illustrate my beliefs here. I believe a lot of these ideas and core beliefs transcend language and spiritual frameworks and can bring us together across those boundaries.

I believe privacy is a God-given right. Many belief systems in human history believed that photography takes something from us, whether it’s a piece of our soul, a violation of our purity, or something even more difficult to describe. I believe it’s easier now than ever before to see how much it costs us to not have privacy.

If I choose to give a part of my life to someone — say something as minor as sending a selfie to my mom — that’s mine to give. It has value and intent behind what I share and who I share it with. It means something highly contextual.

I don’t believe anyone else has the right to share information, images, or other data about me with others without my consent. I don’t believe I should have to spend hours or dollars finding ways to ineffectually beg data brokers to stop doing this.

It should be the other way around. If someone wants my info, they have to ask my permission for it. I want to send that selfie to my mom over cellular lines, using Google’s servers, and all the other little connections between after all, so I agree to their enormous privacy policies. At least they ask, offer something in return, and I can — as a Californian — retract my permission and delete my data any time.

I also understand why some folks want cameras in their businesses or homes. While I don’t like that someone’s Ring camera can record me walking past their house on a public sidewalk and do who-knows-what with that data, it’s much more understandable to me as a personal choice than when my city does it to me, with my tax dollars.

I never agreed to have my own government use my tax dollars to record and store data about me. Obviously, they need to keep some form of records on me for my driver’s license, my home’s title registration, and verifying no one else is pretending to be me. Some of these things are understandable prices to pay for living in modern society.

But there is no justification for 24/7 video or audio surveillance of public spaces.

If I were to moderate my strong beliefs about this, I could compromise a bit. I could say it might make sense to record traffic on a dangerous intersection to get justice for hit-and-runs. Perhaps store that footage for a couple days in case reports come in late. Great, makes sense.

But that video shouldn’t be in the hands of anyone outside my city who doesn’t have good reason to access it. No cloud-based server that can be hacked. No third party data center Wal-Mart uses to train their AI to raise prices on groceries. No unaccountable giant fascist tech conglomerate who aids ICE, the FBI, Border Patrol, and other hostile organizations. And certainly not for any third party organization to sell that data to any of the above.

None of that is worth the completely unproven safety benefits these companies claim.

If someone hit a kid on a bike in front of a gas station twenty years ago, the cops called the gas station to ask for the footage. They told them when the timeframe was, and why it was important. The gas station had the choice to cooperate or not. They usually did. Sometimes they could identify the driver from that footage. Great! There’s a lot of checks and balances between each of those steps to make sure no rogue cop or fascist CEO just gets a blank check to spy on everyone all day, use it to feed their AI, and sell it to whatever creeps on the internet want it.

And, obviously, none of that prevented the kid from being hit in the first place. These surveillance and police militarization tech companies often try to equate recording bad things happening with somehow preventing those things. It doesn’t make sense.

And, as if that wasn’t already enough, I don’t trust these corporations or police to always be perfectly vigilant about having this power over us. It only takes one bad apple to leak our data to the wrong person for ICE to tear someone away from their family. It only takes one hacker breaching Flock’s data canter to get full access to all the footage they’ve gathered on innocent residents since we signed their contract. It’s the opposite of safety for the most vulnerable among us.

Surveillance isn’t safety. Our privacy isn’t anyone else’s to give away without our consent. These beliefs are why I’m so passionate about DeFlocking Emeryville.