Issues
While engaging with the community, I have heard or experienced the challenges that many in Denton face:
- Dangerous roads and failing streets.
- Rising housing costs that make it difficult for people to find adequate housing and stay housed.
- Rapid city growth that threatens to expand into the undeveloped rural edges of Denton.
- Climbing property taxes that reduce affordability, especially for people living on fixed incomes or who work low-wage jobs.
- Increasing transportation costs to own, insure, and repair a vehicle.
- The disappearance of trees and green space.
I am ready to work towards improvements for each of these challenges within three guiding principles:
Crashes are expensive. Dangerous roads reduce quality-of-life and strain Denton’s emergency response resources. Safer roads mean cost savings, fewer injuries, and a more livable community.
Priorities
- Reduce speeding in neighborhoods by implementing measures proven to reduce speeds in the long-run, not just temporarily.
- Ensure adequate funding for streets to provide residents with the quality of roads they expect.
- Prioritize safety in road design, policies, and procedures to ensure all road users get home safely.
- Provide safe routes to school to increase student health, wellbeing, and independence while also reducing the length and frustration of school car lines.
- Prioritize the pedestrian experience in Denton’s walkable commercial areas to attract more foot traffic that supports local businesses and creates a pleasant gathering space for Denton residents.
Anyone can experience a sudden life event: loss of a job, a medical event, divorce, a death in the family. We need the flexibility to adapt to the challenges that life throws at us. We also need a menu of options that allow each of us to design the life we want to live.
Priorities
- Provide Denton residents with more choices for housing types at a variety of price points and for various lifestyles, stages of life, and incomes. Most housing in Denton is either expensive single family homes or large apartment complexes. Denton needs more options in the middle.
- Offer safe, reliable access to a variety of transportation options, including driving, public transportation, walking, and bicycle/e-scooter. Enable residents to choose among these options for each trip depending on distance, ability, cost, weather, type of trip, or preference. Everyone should have access to safe transportation to work and other daily needs even if their car breaks down or they’re among the 30% of Texans who cannot drive.
- Give small local businesses a fighting chance to contribute to the fabric of Denton’s unique culture by identifying and adjusting the biggest policy and process barriers that prevent small business from getting started or growing.
More money and time should be spent on our top priorities, while less should be spent on our lower priorities. We need to be strategic in how we spend these limited resources to ensure the biggest impact for each dollar we spend.
Priorities
- Save taxpayer dollars by developing a game plan to reduce Denton’s reliance on debt (bonds) for maintenance of existing infrastructure. Using debt to pay for things like road maintenance is more expensive than paying for it with revenue.
- Enable growth patterns that lower our tax burden, decrease costs for households and businesses, improve environmental and fiscal sustainability, and allow the city to be more efficient with its limited resources.
- Focus on investments that create the greatest impact per dollar spent. This includes our investments in economic development, transportation, affordable housing, and environmental sustainability.
- Improve efficiency and effectiveness of city staff by identifying and revising policies and procedures that cause city staff to spend more time on unnecessary or low-impact tasks instead of critical, high-impact work.
- Focus City Council priorities to a more manageable number. Too many simultaneous priorities reduces our ability to achieve any of them.