On the Issues

Engagement & Transparency

I’ve enjoyed serving as the former city manager and want to give everyone an opportunity to engage with the city. I’m absolutely convinced that the more people have an opportunity to positively engage with the city government, the more they’ll love their community.

I propose moving city council meetings to Thursday evenings to have two valuable impacts.

Staff will have an easier time preparing the agenda that we can post earlier in the week. Posting the council agendas further in advance will provide a better chance for people to read agendas and better know what’s going on in their community.

We have a ton of great people who have shown a willingness to engage in their community that participate in youth groups on Wednesday nights. It’s time we give those adult leaders and youth participants a better chance to get involved.

Let's also make it easier to help people experience our city government. We need to continue to emphasize better ways to engage outside of social media. Town halls, focus groups, and work sessions have been some of my favorite city engagements: they’ve helped me experience the city from a whole new perspective. Let’s make sure we’re stressing those types of citizen experiences especially when big decisions are being made.

Redevelopment & Housing

The city has done amazing work partnering with other agencies to turn what would have remained an industrial wasteland into the vibrant city we now know and love. All these efforts were not cheap, nor without risks. But the very early founders of Vineyard and the original families that sold their land to allow this massive growth to happen and filled the need that allowed almost all of us the chance to be here.

Utah still remains one of the hottest housing markets in the nation and if we don't plan properly, we'll lose out on opportunities for our kids and grandkids to live here. Failing to address that issue head on is the fastest way that we can lose our identity in this great city.

The Vineyard Redevelopment Agency (RDA) can help incentivize the development of missing middle housing like duplexes, smaller single family homes, and townhomes that would be otherwise financially difficult to build.

We have a lot of large homes, we have a lot of apartments, let's do more to help create options for people who want homeownership opportunities to be able to afford to establish roots here.

Let's also better collaborate with our partner agencies and ensure we're all trying to achieve our shared vision.

Community Events

Vineyard is well positioned geographically to draw in a lot of regional events. We've been able to support a vibrant and community-oriented culture in part through some of these great events. As our commercial base continues to grow, we'll have more opportunities for these to be positive for our finances too. Let's keep our core events healthy and well-attended while we focus on growing our economic development base to support future endeavors.

Public Safety

Despite being such a small city, we have a great police and fire department. Contracting for those services with larger agencies provides us greater access to resources at a much more predictable cost and much fewer legal risks. Our partner agencies match our local values when it comes to proactive enforcement and planning. We should continue to contract with these agencies and continue to support them as much as we have.

Parks and Trails

Everyone knows Vineyard has the best trail network. We're well equipped to continue to maintain this trail network if we continue to look at things long-term. Building our commercial base will continue to provide additional sales tax revenue that's earmarked for parks, trails, and other recreational uses.

We need to continue to support our local businesses so we can continue to enjoy and improve the best parts about Vineyard.

Staffing

Employees make the city government. Most of what cities do is predicated on the human capital that makes things happen. Supporting our staff with a psychologically safe and accountable environment will yield a much more effective workforce than bullying, vilifying, or harassing would.

We are very lucky to have the staff that we do at Vineyard and to drive away our best people in order to get the only qualified people who are willing to put up with a negative environment is 1000% the wrong approach.

Let's be mindful of the physical and social environment we create and support our public employees so they can best support us.

Trust

Our city deserves to have a government that they can trust. This starts with transparency and openness. We need to create more ways for people to get involved in opportunities that the city has to offer. I want to give our residents a front-row seat to the amazing work our city is doing. Let's rebuild lost trust and bring the citizens to the front of the issues.

Getting Rid of Railroad Crossings

The city has focused a lot of time and effort on many projects and has gotten a lot done. But we have a lot in the pipeline that needs more focus. We need to take a step back from some projects so we can dedicate more energy, resources, and focus on others.

The city has worked for many years to get rid of the railroad crossings with some of the busiest ones being at Center Street and 400 N. The traffic flow at these intersections are incredibly dangerous and have a great impact on our residents' and visitors' qualities of life. We need to put greater focus into this effort and reconsider how we've been approaching the problem in the past.

Long-term Decision Making

It's tempting to advocate for the cheaper today, more expensive tomorrow option. But very often bandage solutions cause massive problems for future city councils. I'm invested in this city long-term. I've set my roots here intentionally and am locked in for the long haul. I want to invest in the future of this city. We'll save a ton of money in the long run by making decisions that are focused on what's best over the next 5-10 years rather than how we can get by while mortgaging our future.

What's especially incredible about planning for the future of Vineyard is that we're landlocked. We know what areas are left to development and can have really solid estimates about what the city will look like in 20 years. As we can afford it, let's take advantage of those long-term investment that we know can serve the needs of the city for the next 100 years.

Long-term, impactful, generational decisions should have extensive public buy-in. Let's get more people to the table and take an appropriate amount of time to allow the public to get informed about these big decisions. The public deserve to be brought along with us in our decision-making no matter how long it takes.

Our children and our children's children will thank us.

Parking

This is a huge deal for me. I’ve lived in both high-density and single-family housing in Vineyard. I know what it’s like to try to figure out how to manage parking with roommates. I’ve had friends move out of Vineyard because of frustrations with parking. I also know what it’s like to be frustrated by people crowding the streets with too many cars from having too many people living in units. I’ve seen neighbors struggle with parking disputes.

Currently, we contract out for almost all of our parking enforcement in the city. We can take better charge and ownership of our own parking program by bringing parking enforcement in-house. Doing this will allow us to do more educating and less evicting. The parking fines that most people receive far exceed any justification for the infraction when it comes to deterring problematic behavior. We should want our parking program to help educate and make better informed citizens so we can solve our problems long-term instead of frustrating people so much that they move out and are replaced with a whole new group of residents that are unfamiliar with our parking regulations.

Transience is the enemy of community. People want to stay here and build a community here. Let's incentivize them to do that. By bringing parking in house we can also be more flexible and adaptable to unique circumstances (like allowing Lakefront to use their passes overnight on those adjacent city roads).

Heritage and Culture

Let's continue to make wise investments in our unique heritage and culture that are critical to the identity of Vineyard.

We have many wonderful volunteers who care deeply about sharing and educating about our heritage and hosting cultural events.

We can support them despite all of the challenges the future is bringing.

Innovation & Technology

Employees are important and essential to city operations but they're our most expensive asset. Investment in technology that help employees to accomplish tasks more efficiently is the best use of tax dollars. New initiatives take time to start-up and get rolling, but they usually pay massive dividends in the long-run. Let's continue to identify low-hanging fruit where processes can be more effective and efficient and adopt technology to continue to meet the demands of massive growth while providing needed services to residents.

Think about how many staff hours it used to take to mail-in utility payments. Someone had to pick up checks, take them to the bank, sign them, provide receipts. Now, this entire service is completely automated for 99% of people.

Collaboration

Let's work together on big projects. We can discuss ideas on their merits. We'll be much better served when we're all working together in openness and honesty. I'm ready to work with whomever is elected and our current councilmembers to change things for the better.

Endorsements

City and county managers and administrators across the country are encouraged by our professional associations to not seek endorsements from political parties. As such, I did not seek the endorsement of any political parties in this race. I am however proud to share my endorsement from our local firefighters. Our first responders are essential to our safety and security in Vineyard.