Editor’s note: This Q&A is lightly edited for clarity and style.

The Student Voters Union worked with Associated Students of Madison to host a forum Wednesday evening for District 8 alder candidates to discuss what they will do for students ahead of the April 7 Common Council election.

The candidates for District 8 — an area of Madison largely comprised of UW students — UW sophomores Bobby Gronert and Ellen Zhang, answered questions asked by SVU president Genevieve Lambert and crowd members.

Q: Introduce yourselves.

Gronert: Hey there, I’m Bobby. I’m a sophomore, I’m a socialist, I’m running to be your next District 8 alder. I’ve been working in politics for about five years in Milwaukee and now here in Madison, fighting and winning for my teachers on the school board, defending student funds over here in the ASM and just trying to provide for and protect my community.

Zhang: Hello, my name is Ellen, I’m a sophomore. I am running to represent you on Madison City Council as a student, as a renter, as a daughter of immigrants. I’m an artist. I try to bring together community, I’ve been doing a lot of outreach, too. I think right now, I’ve attended events at over 30 unique organizations, but it’s all been an effort to meet people where they are and to ask people what issues they care about.

Q: If you are elected, what ideas do you have to help students?

G: For students, one of the biggest things here is housing. The housing crisis is bad, it’s getting worse … over the last five years, rent’s gone up 47%. The dorms are at their highest occupancy rate ever, 115% of capacity, and there’s no plans to build new dorms because the state legislature sucks ass.

I guess maybe I shouldn’t swear here, I’m sorry for that. But I think one of the biggest things we want to do is just work on the housing, trying to build on public housing, trying to really make it easy for people to find affordable housing that’s not being run by some landlord trying to give them a profit scam.

I think also tenant regulations, tenants have a lot of rights, but because the legal system is based around time and money, it’s hard to enforce them and hold your landlord accountable. So we’re trying to provide city-provided tenant defense lawyers who would help fight those, prosecute those landlords for their actions.

Z: As far as housing goes, I mean those statistics, absolutely. It’s really difficult, not just for us students, but people across the City of Madison, people in peripheries who don’t have grocery access and don’t have transit lines.

So it’s not just about housing, but it’s also about transit that can serve people who live beyond downtown. It’s about transit after midnight. It’s about pedestrian and cyclist safety so that we can reduce congestion and decrease risks for people, and it’s about public health and safety as far as racial justice, reproductive justice and thinking about communities who are impacted beyond just students.

Q: How will you approach outreach and relationship building with UW students and your other constituents?

G: This campaign first has been about building a grassroots movement of students and workers ready to build a future for the city … in the long term. I’ve worked with people from the Students Against Mass Incarceration on their work against policing and against ICE, especially as we prepare for them to come to our city, students from the Young Progressives and Sunrise Movement [and] from [Young Democratic Socialists of America], really just knocking on doors, trying to talk to students about what they care about.

And as an alder, I’ll come to any event where I can talk to students, just get the perspective. I think it’s an important part of representing someone to actually know what they think, instead of just sitting in City Hall, sitting in your apartment, deciding what you think.

Z: People are on their phones. So first of all, it’s been a lot of social media outreach, and I have my team to thank for trying to identify where people are on social media. But beyond phones, it’s — again —  it’s about door knocking and it’s about going to events where people already are.

I’m lucky to be a part of really active clubs, but I’ve also attended Asian interest clubs, reproductive rights, sustainable engineering [clubs] and housing justice and community events as well, about reproductive justice and about immigrants rights and immigrants’ defense. So, because people who vote are also people who are involved in other ways — voting is the first step — but if you’re going to be at a club or if you’re going to be doing community organizing, there’s so much more that you can do.

Q from the audience: One of the committees that the District 8 alder sits on is the Joint Campus Area Committee. What relationship do you hope to build with university administration through that?

Z: Well, leadership is undergoing change right now. Chancellor Mnookin is leaving, we have a different provost, but there’s a lot of initiatives within the city and also within the university that alter that relationship.

There’s the UniverCity Alliance, there’s the Mayor’s Innovation Project, which I think Mayor Rhodes-Conway used to be an employee for, so now she’s an expert on advising mayors and also being a mayor, which is kind of fun. It’s just asking the questions of who knows what’s going on and who knows the history, and how do we make the most effective decisions.

G: My university administration, I’m not the happiest with them. I think the UWPD, especially the direction they’ve gotten under Chancellor Mnookin has been horrible, from the encampment to UWPD’s sustained large bar raids. It’s a big discussion for another time, with the city part, but the university has also been assisting in those somewhat more than they used to, from what I understand.

But again, the encampment was a bigger violation of civic duty by the university. I wasn’t here at that point, I was in Milwaukee, but we were shocked to see them beat teachers, beat people just standing around and just making their opinion heard.

I think that my first bit of press I ever got really here at Madison was an article with The Badger Herald for calling the chancellor a coward when she had talked to the ASM. I’m not afraid to call out the university. I’m not afraid to be mean to them because they’re being mean to students, give them the same in return.

I would love to work with them on making things better for students, but we’ll see with new leadership. I like the new provost, we’ve talked a bit. I’ve liked what I’ve heard from him more than what I’ve heard from Mnookin, so I’m hopeful there. The chancellor, we will have to see. If it’s someone in the vein of Mnookin again, who is going to be anti-student freedom of speech and anti-student in general, then perhaps it’ll be not too nice of a relationship.

Z: By being mean to the administration, what does that entail?

G: Just standing up to them. The university administration often comes to a District 8 alder hoping to smooth things over from what I’ve heard from previous District 8 alders. Maybe we don’t speak up, or maybe we do make a big stink about it.

I think that people pressure is the most powerful tool we have at our disposal, especially here in Madison, with the capital so close. If I was in office during the encampment, I would have responded in a much stronger way than the alder who was in office did.

The statement that was put out was pretty tepid, it was basically saying, “I disagree with this somewhat.” It wasn’t really a very strong statement. I would have said the Chancellor and the university are really abdicating their responsibilities to the student body.

They need to allow students to exercise their free speech. They need to stop attacking students. They need to listen to their demands and take them seriously … taking the high road every single time does not always get you where you want to be.

Chancellor Mnookin has had absolutely no involvement in bar raids and any statement to that effect is not supported by facts, according to an email statement from UW spokesperson John Lucas. Lucas said in the email that Mnookin cares deeply about UW students, listens to their concerns and meets with them frequently.

UW’s director of community relations Brenda Gonzales and Mnookin have both had contact with District 8 Alder MGR Govindarajan and other elected officials to answer questions and work on issues of mutual concern, Lucas said in the email.

Govindarajan said his role was to identify the organizers of the encampment and then try to get them in a room with the UW admin — which he said was successful. The City Council proposed two resolutions that condemned UWPD’s actions and advocated for a peaceful resolution along with asking for the UW administration to engage in good faith negotiations.