Three Priorities for a City That Works

Petaluma is a great place to live. But many residents feel City Hall has become too complicated and too focused on new programs. City government should first do the basic things well. My priorities are simple:

Take care of our city. Spend our money wisely. Listen to the people.

1. Take Care of Our City

Take care of our city — streets and sidewalks

Measure U was sold to Petalumans as the way we would finally fix our streets. I want that money doing the job voters were told it would do. What did it cost, what did we get, and was it done on time?

• Measure U dollars go to pavement and sidewalks, reported publicly every year in plain English.

• Long-term pavement plans we actually stick to, with a repair schedule residents can look up by street. Enact a monthly streets repair team to repair streets around the City and help our residents.

• Do not let perfect be the enemy of good. We have spent years mired in setbacks and budget creep chasing perfect complete streets while the pavement got worse for everyone — drivers, pedestrians and cyclists alike.

• Expand the sidewalk repair program alongside an aggressive paving plan. Broken sidewalks are a safety and accessibility problem for all Petalumans.

Take care of our city — parks and open space

Our parks and open spaces are a large part of why families stay in Petaluma. The basics come first here too: take care of what we already have, and finish what we started.

• Maintain and improve the parks we have before taking on new obligations

• Keep open space intact where wildlife and habitat depend on it.

• Finish the trail network so people can reach our open spaces easily so people can move easily, walking, rolling or biking.

Take care of our city — police and fire

Our residents deserve a community that is safe with fair treatment for all and as well as being well prepared for emergencies. My wife, Cynthia, works as an Administrative Aide with a neighboring city police department. Our officers and firefighters deserve competitive pay and a city that keeps its promises to them.

Petalumans deserve to know what those promises cost over twenty years alongside what they cost next year. Both of those are true at once.

• Bargain in good faith and on time — dragging out negotiations is its own form of disrespect.

• Publish the long-term cost before the vote, so the decision is an informed one.

• Fund the work: staffing and training are how a contract becomes a service residents feel.

Take care of our city — how we build

I want good projects built here, and I want the people who already live here to still recognize their town.

Those goals fit together. What damages both is a process where the rules change quietly.

• Make permitting cheaper, faster and more predictable, and allow more flexible uses so good projects can actually happen.

• Staff should be available to respond to inquiries. We can judiciously use AI tools to expedite permitting — completeness checks before submittal, and a plain-English assistant that tells a homeowner or small business what their project needs, roughly what it costs and how long it should take, before they pay a fee.

• Ensure accurate environmental reviews are completed for residential and commercial development proposals

• Keep clear height and massing limits so new buildings sit comfortably beside what is already there, and hold real design standards so every project adds something to the street.

• Publish permit turnaround times against our targets, so everyone can see whether it is working.

My promise:
Focus on the basics and get them done.

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2. Spend Our Money Wisely

Spend our money wisely — opening the books

Before this city asks residents to pay more in sales tax increases or vacancy tax programs, we need much more publicized budgeting processes and reviews of the city’s annual financial reports. I want our council and our residents better informed about how each department builds its budget and actually spends its funding. It is the public’s money and they should see how it is spent.

• Treat the shared pool of tax money as one conversation. Residents pay into one pot and deserve the whole picture, including the enterprise funds and special districts that almost never get discussed in public.

• Make the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report a real agenda item with a presentation and questions, rather than a line on the consent calendar.

• Give residents AI-powered tools to ask questions about the budget in plain English, so understanding city finances does not require a specialist.

• Report back on outcomes as well as spending: what problem were we trying to solve, and how would we know whether it worked?

Spend our money wisely — accountability from City Hall

Our residents share their needs and tell us about mistakes at City Hall. We need to take their concerns seriously and take care not to get defensive when oversights and missteps are brought to our attention. Our elected representatives and city staff are aligned to do what is best for Petaluma, and when we get feedback that this is not happening it becomes our top priority to get back on course. Especially when an outside body like the Sonoma County Grand Jury tells this city something is wrong, the right response is to take it seriously (Recent downtown hotel controversy, fairgrounds transition, annual budget approval come to mind.)

• Criteria-based annual reviews of the City Manager and City Attorney — the review stays confidential, the criteria and the results should be public

• Contracted services get monitored on performance, with results reported to Council and the public

• When the city gets something wrong, it says so on the record and explains what changed

My promise:
Respect your money and show you the results.

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3. Listen to the People

Listen to the people -- how meetings are managed

Every resident has already earned the right to be heard at City Hall. You should not need to be an attorney, an activist or a City Hall expert to have a voice.

• Full public comment time, applied the same way on every item.

• Hard items scheduled early enough that working people can attend.

• A real written answer when a resident asks a real question, posted with the agenda packet.

Listen to the people — protecting our historic downtown

Our historic downtown is the reason people love this town and the reason they visit it. I put my own time into defending it, and I will keep doing that as mayor.

• I personally collected over five hundred signatures for the referendum against the downtown zoning overlay.

• That grassroots effort helped protect the historic district’s height and density limits, and moved the Appellation hotel from six stories to a four-story design that fits our existing rules.

• Any change to downtown — whether it comes from a developer or from our own General Plan and zoning updates — needs to be communicated to residents early and often.

Listen to the people — privacy and surveillance

Public safety and civil liberties belong together, and I have spent enough time on both sides of this conversation to believe Petaluma can have both. We have adopted surveillance tools faster than we have adopted the policies that govern them.

• Our policy says we do not share this data with federal or out-of-state agencies. Other California cities said the same and the State Auditor found otherwise. An annual public audit is how a promise becomes a fact.

• Any new surveillance technology comes to Council as its own agenda item, with a written use policy, retention limits and a real cost, before it goes into service.

• Publish the numbers every year: how many searches, by whom, for what kinds of cases, how long data is kept, and every agency we share it with.

My promise:
Listen to residents. Ask hard questions. Take responsibility.

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The Simple Choice

This campaign is not about left versus right.
It is about whether our city government works.
I want Petaluma to be a city that:

Takes care of what we have.
Spends money carefully.
Plans for the future without forgetting today's challenges.
Listens to residents.
Gets things done.

That is the kind of City Hall I would work to build as mayor.

Take care of our city.
Spend our money wisely.
Listen to the people.
A City That Works for Petaluma.