Mayoral candidate John Haila, who describes himself as “passionately non-partisan,” said in his September profile with the Daily that he wants to ensure that jobs in the public sector in Ames continue to be stable or grow because of how many of the jobs in Ames fall in that category.

Haila supports the Resolution Reaffirming the Public Safety Function of Law Enforcement, which discusses how Ames Police will handle immigration enforcement.

“I do not advocate for people actively being sought out and deported, but I’m also highly committed to we are under a rule of law, and federal law and state law need to be abided with and to be an outlier to trying to reject that… to try and go a different direction could become a very slippery slope,” Haila said.

With the state legislature recently voting that housing laws related to the number of family members in a household are illegal, Haila again stressed his belief in hearing as many viewpoints as possible before making decisions about how the city should respond.

“I believe that at this point in time, Council is landing on one adult per bedroom plus one and I believe this seems to be a reasonable compromise,” Haila said at the candidate forum hosted by student government on Nov. 2.

With regards to the lease gap, Haila feels the city government should not be involved in regulating leases.

“I would not be supportive of the city starting to insert itself into dealing with lease issues,” Haila said at the Nov. 2 candidate forum. “A lease is a legal document that you enter into, a student enters into with a landlord and for the city to start getting into and dealing with lease issues, I believe becomes an overextension of what the city’s responsibilities should be. I am certainly sympathetic to that and I know that when you are going to school and you sign a lease that there’s a lot of fine print.”

When Haila was asked about tangible actions to increase inclusion for black residents of Ames at the Oct. 18 candidate forum at the Ames Public Library, he responded with a general message of relationship building.

“It is not just a matter of saying ‘someone else should do it,’ it is actually us personally reaching out across the aisle, across the street, whatever, and just saying ‘I want to get to know you.’ How can we really understand anybody if we don’t really know them, and that’s what’s important. So I am committed to establishing and building relationships with people from all different walks of life,” Haila said.