Five priorities for District 3.

Look hard at partnerships with builders and providers, and add housing people can afford without losing the residential character of the town.

People who work in Pacific Grove should be able to live in Pacific Grove. I also do not want to wake up in a town I no longer recognize. I do not think those two things have to be in conflict, but avoiding it takes some care about where and how we build. I want to investigate partnerships with builders and housing providers, and take seriously the mixed-use options already in front of us, like the Holman Building.

Treat wildfire preparedness as infrastructure, not an afterthought: defensible space, a real evacuation plan, and support for our fire service and CERT volunteers.

We are a town built into a forest, on a peninsula, with a limited number of ways out. That is worth thinking about before we need to evacuate and not during. I volunteer with CERT, and I was one of the residents who pushed for the new fire truck. I want defensible space, evacuation planning, and emergency communication to be things we fund on purpose rather than assume.

Repave the roads, fix the sidewalks, and improve street lighting where safety requires it — on a funded plan, not deferred one more year.

Deferred maintenance is not an accident. It is a budget decision, made one year at a time, until the bill is large enough to be frightening. Roads, sidewalks and street lighting are ordinary projects with a scope, a schedule and a cost, and I have spent a career managing exactly that kind of work. I want a published plan with the money identified before the work is promised.

Protect the habitat and biological diversity that make this place what it is, from the shoreline to the trees to the butterfly sanctuary.

The shoreline, the Monterey pines and the monarch sanctuary are why people love living here and why visitors come at all. Protecting that habitat is an obligation, and it also happens to be the foundation of our local economy. I will weigh development and infrastructure decisions against what they do to the biological diversity that makes Pacific Grove different from everywhere else on the Peninsula.

Bring some budget discipline to city spending, and work with other Peninsula communities and the state on the pension and CalPERS costs squeezing all of us.

Budget analysis is what I did for a living. Our pension and CalPERS obligations are a structural problem that no single small city is going to solve on its own, which is exactly why I would rather see Pacific Grove working with other Peninsula communities and state officials on it than absorbing it quietly every year and hoping.

Measure R would add a 0.375% local sales tax for ten years, raising about $1 million a year for streets, sidewalks, beaches, parks, playgrounds and public facilities, for repairing and replacing aging infrastructure, and for fire protection, paramedic, crime prevention and 9-1-1 response. The money stays local and is subject to independent audits.

I do not take a new tax lightly, and I have spent a career being skeptical of other people's budget numbers. But the repairs this pays for are the same deferred maintenance I have been raising at council meetings for years, and putting it off again has never once made it cheaper.

I also want to be straight with you about how it works. Measure R is a general tax. The money goes into the General Fund, and the list in the ballot question — streets, sidewalks, parks, fire and emergency response — is what the council intends to spend it on, not a legal guarantee that it will. Each year, a council decides.

That is precisely why it matters who sits on that council. A million dollars a year is not abstract to me; reading budgets and holding people to what they committed to is what I did for twenty-seven years. If the voters pass this, I will treat those independent audits as part of the job, and I will push to spend it on what residents were told it was for.