Platform

  • Preserving Our Quality of Life
  • Valuing a Community for all Ages
  • Advocating Sustainable Development
  • Demanding Fiscal Responsibility
  • Promoting Premium Job Growth

People ask me, why are you running for city council, what do you stand for?

This is the answer: Now is the time.

Now is the time. The economic downturn has a silver lining. It’s given us the pause we need to regroup and ready ourselves for the next wave.

When the Unified Development Ordinance was drafted, it wasn’t contemplated that anyone would want to build a 26 story building in downtown Asheville. Now that we know what the new landscape looks like, we can re-tool, and focus on what’s most important to us: preserving what we love about Asheville – the quality of life it affords us. Our quality of life is what we need to preserve.

Everyone talks about quality of life, but what does that mean? To me, quality of life means maintaining and enhancing a community for all ages. A place where we can raise our children and also retire. A place where we can walk to the store, our kids can walk to school, folks can bike to work, but also a community that encourages and fosters interactions across generations. We have this in Asheville, but it needs to be both preserved and enhanced.

When I moved to Asheville in 1988, our town was a beautiful, sleepy place, without many job opportunities, but the housing was still reasonably affordable. Since that time, and thanks to our environment, the Biltmore Estate, and local businesses like New Morning Gallery, Barleys, Malaprops, and Tops for Shoes (the oldies but goodies), Asheville has become one of the most desirable places to live. Attaining that status brought with it great strain on our community with the influx of builders, developers and entrepreneurs. Asheville’s antiquated development ordinances, crumbling water system, and basic city infrastructure weren’t designed for this kind of growth.

If you agree that NOW IS THE TIME, then I want your partnership. This is the time to take a pause, take a breath and right this train so we can continue on our journey in this wonderful city. I’m asking for your help, I’m asking for your vote.