- September 16, 2024
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Age: 30
Current occupation: Principal product manager
Resident of Manatee County: 3.5 years
1) Ethics. Our current county commissioners have a long history of illegal and unethical conduct. From coordinating actions on votes behind the scenes to using code enforcement and development departments for personal gain, residents no longer feel their government works for them.
I plan to address this issue by improving transparency with residents and pushing for a new code of ethics for commissioner and county employees.
2) Economic growth. I believe the key for the future of District 3 lies in redevelopment and responsible development in other districts to provide amenities closer to where people live.
Our redevelopment policies need to favor attracting new businesses, such as manufacturing firms by the Port of Manatee, and more affordable housing.
The key is to do this using our partnerships with local businesses, the Bradenton EDC and the Manatee Chamber of Commerce. This will reduce the government footprint in our local economy and allow us to issue grants and other incentives tied to specific and measurable outcomes.
3) Traffic and congestion. Traffic in District 3 is the worst it has ever been, and as commissioner I want to address traffic flow and public safety on our roads.
Cortez Road from DeSoto Square Mall to Bradenton Beach has three of the top 10 most dangerous intersections from Tampa to Naples, according to FDOT. In the past four years, FDOT has tracked more than 5,000 incidents and 500 deaths. This is a concerning pattern playing out on a number of roads where city, county and state share responsibility.
I would like to address traffic and safety by engaging in partnerships with the state and cities to fund protected bike lanes on a mix of county and state roads.
Residents also want to see more traffic lights, speed buffers and more illuminated crosswalks on our local county roads.
Lastly, residents want our county to improve sidewalks and medians especially in gaps between the city and county lines.
We need a new generation of leadership outside the establishment with a fresh perspective on tackling local issues.
The majority on our board adheres to the short-term needs of a select few special interest groups while failing to empower the average resident.
I want to get our county government back to thinking long-term about how we spend our tax dollars and the value we get out of them.
I have an engineering background with experience managing enterprise-scale organizations with multi-million dollar budgets and high-performing teams.
I have served in a number of leadership roles throughout my career, tackling issues such as immigration, veterans healthcare and national security.
That has helped me gain the temperament and skills necessary to operate in high-stakes environments.
Locally I have given back to a number of non-profit organizations to help at-risk youth and the homeless.
I have been recognized by Leadership Manatee and Leadership Florida as an up-and-coming leader statewide and believe I am the best prepared for this role.
My primary opponent is not a serious candidate. Her last-minute change to District 3 from District 7, following a failure to take on George Kruse, shows her only desire is to win a seat on the Board of County Commissioners rather than being committed to her constituents.
As chair of the Manatee GOP, she has failed to raise funds to help our party and was outraised by the Manatee Democratic Party, bringing in only $65 to their $80,000 dollars.
She has a record of misconduct older than I am, and her time as chair has been fraught with calls to resign by several members.
Beyond her failure to lead the Republican Party, my opponent has never been in charge of a major organization with any significant budget and never managed employees in any significant number.
Over seven months, I worked countless hours, along with dedicated volunteers, to collect more than 556 petitions from District 3 residents. I have knocked on hundreds of doors in the district; it is the responsibility of leaders to reach out to their constituents. A leader does not wait on standby.
Livable Manatee, passed in 2017, has led to the creation of more than 3,000 units of affordable housing. The program is working even with the economic headwinds we have faced.
As commissioner, I would focus less on any new incentives and address any shortcomings with our land codes or ordinances to see where we can reduce the barriers for private firms to continue to provide affordable options for housing.
Today the majority of our County Commission allows far too many patchwork changes to our comprehensive plan without resident input.
I believe we need to increase transparency with amendments to our land codes and comprehensive plan while reducing the influence of special interest groups.
I believe in the future we will need to evaluate future zoning against the needs for improvements in stormwater management and food security.
As we grow, we are likely to see more mixed-use zoning to make better use of space we have, and the market has been moving toward this direction for the past decade.
Urban sprawl has continued. We have lost natural landscapes, and development to the west has not happened at the scale many would like.
The economics for development over new lands to the east, up to and past the FDAB, have made more sense for firms over the past 30 years. Rather than allow the government more control over growth, we need a new approach.
On conservation, we should enforce strong protections for wetlands, while working with the Legislature to create tax credits or other incentives for landowners to preserve sensitive, natural lands.
In areas such as Parrish, where we do not have large-scale master-planned communities, I would evaluate the need for overlay districts to preserve the character of our communities while allowing for firms to pay into amenities needed by residents.
For further development in and around Lakewood Ranch, I would like to see new development pay into the amenities not planned-for by the master plan so we can reduce the tax burden on residents. Lastly, raise impact fees.
The market has determined demand for housing in our county. I believe the role of the government is to find a way to be in sync with the market demands; plan for future growth with capital improvement projects; and ensure we are collecting revenues that will pay for those improvements. This means we need to raise and collect impact fees from developers to avoid sticking everyday residents with the bill.
I believe our strategy for District 3 needs to focus on implementing complete streets, where they make sense, and limiting the use of eminent domain, which often affects older residents on fixed-incomes who cannot just pick up and move someplace else.
I would like to see the Bradenton-Palmetto connector built east of downtown to relieve traffic. This will avoid taking private properties on 26th Street West and 43rd Street West in my district.
Beyond that, residents are asking for protected bike paths, mixed-use trails and more sidewalks to improve pedestrian and bicyclist safety.
I would plan to invest in making these improvements to county roads while partnering with our cities and FDOT to apply those improvements to their roads as well.
Impact fees pay for impact of new development in our communities. Historically, these have been kept, artificially, at 50% of rates from a decade ago.
With inflation and growth, we need to raise them to 100% of the most recent study. Failure to do so will increase our county debt and force residents to subsidize developments they will not be utilizing.
The impact to new home buyers will barely register on their mortgages, but for existing residents this can often be a budget shortfall in the tens of millions of dollars.
Nonprofits and private owners should be leading the way rather than the government, but there can be opportunities for public-private partnerships, such as with Triangle Ranch.
In a referendum, 70% of Manatee County taxpayers supported the environmental lands tax that went toward purchasing lands for acquisition. Because of the current County Commission, this program has become politicized and proven inefficient at conserving and preserving land.
F-minus. The current Manatee County Commission has doubled the county budget and tripled the county debt to $700 million over the past four years.
Each year our county government spends more money paying down its debt than addressing the needs of residents today. Much of this debt can be traced to wasteful spending in the capital improvement projects list, such as 59th Street West, and how the county has misspent our tourist development dollars.
Now the convention and visitors bureau is trying to get an increase this year to the tourist tax to waste even more of your dollars pursuing vanity projects. We need to cut the number of projects in our CIP, raise impact fees to cover the shortfall for infrastructure projects and be more responsible with how we use our tourist tax dollars.
We need to cut 59th Street West from our capital improvements project and re-evaluate the needs for a number of parking garages that our county government is being asked to pay for.
In terms of new spending, I would prioritize investments to reduce long-term fleet maintenance costs for our sheriff’s office and utilities departments.
We also need to extend the life of our landfill or risk paying exorbitant rates to truck out our trash.
Lastly, I would like to identify how we can recruit and retain talent for the sheriff’s office and our utilities department to better serve our residents.
When factoring in the increased revenue from property taxes, the county millage is too high. We should target lowering it by half over the next four years.
Government should collect only what it needs and limit the use of a general fund. Instead, we should try to create designated funds, similar to how we fund utilities and target investment into those funds based on performance metrics and outcomes.
Every business I lead or have been a part of has funded departments and projects with the expectation of an ROI. Governments need to start thinking like start-ups and businesses to be strategic with tax dollars.
