Our Campaign’s Five Foundations

Growth that Stays Home.

Denver is in a building boom but too much of that work hires out-of-state crews and out-of-state firms while the families who built these neighborhoods get priced out. When this city builds, it should build with Denver’s hands and Denver’s businesses. That’s not sentiment. It’s something the council votes on every time it approves a contract.

Here’s what I’ll fight for:

• Hire Denver to build Denver. Every major city and airport project crosses the council’s desk for approval. I’ll use that vote: community workforce agreements that put local workers and registered apprentices on the job, so the biggest construction pipeline in the state builds careers here instead of exporting them.
• Make the city’s contracts reach Denver’s own businesses. For real. Denver already sets goals for small, local, and minority- and women-owned firms on its contracts. Too often they get missed. I’ll fight to strengthen those goals and actually enforce them, so local preference is a result, not a line in a binder.
• Fully fund the paths to ownership we already have. Denver runs down-payment assistance and funds legal help for families who’d otherwise lose their homes to eviction. The problem isn’t that these don’t exist. It’s that they run dry. I’ll protect and grow them in the budget, because a waitlist shouldn’t be the reason a family keeps renting.
• Build careers, not just jobs. Expand the city’s workforce training and wire it straight into that local-hire pipeline, in aviation, logistics, the trades, the creative economy, so a kid from any block has a real path in.

A real middle class isn’t a slogan. It’s a city where the people who keep it running can afford to live in it. Every contract, every budget. That’s where I’ll fight for it.

Safe Streets. Earned Trust.

Everyone deserves to feel safe. In their home, on their block, at their job. Safety and trust rise together: a city is safest when people believe the system is fair and accountable. I’ll invest in both and I’ll be specific about how.

Here’s what I’ll fight for:

• Send the right responder to every call and close the gap that stops it. Denver’s STAR program sends a clinician and a medic, not a squad car, to people in mental-health crisis. It works. But today it reaches fewer than half the calls it was built for, because the dispatch system doesn’t route them. The council approves STAR’s budget and contracts. I’ll use that to expand it toward around-the-clock coverage and fix the routing, so the calls that should get STAR actually do.
• Invest in what prevents harm. Fund the youth programs, lit and activated public spaces, and community conditions that stop crime before it starts. Not just the response after.
• Policing that’s well-trained, well-resourced, and trusted. Back the training and resources officers need to do the job well, paired with the accountability that earns the public’s trust.
• Accountability that outlasts the headlines. On the Citizen Oversight Board, I helped shape a citywide ordinance bringing transparency to police misconduct settlements. I’ll keep writing that kind of accountability into law because it protects the public’s trust and the taxpayer’s dollar at the same time.

Safe streets and earned trust aren’t opposites. A city that invests in both gets both.

A common-sense watchdog for your tax dollars.

City Hall should work as hard as the people it serves. In a budget crunch, that takes a watchdog. Someone who guards every dollar, protects the services families count on, and refuses to balance the books on the backs of the workers who deliver them. The budget is the council’s job. I’ll treat it like it’s your money because it is.

Here’s what I’ll fight for:

• Protect core services and the workers who deliver them. When the budget tightens, the answer isn’t gutting the services families rely on or the workforce that provides them. Approving and shaping that budget is the council’s direct power and I’ll use it to protect both.
• Keep your data and privacy in your hands. As the city adds more surveillance tech (cameras, license-plate readers, facial recognition) there’s no real rulebook protecting residents’ privacy. Writing those protections into law is squarely the council’s job, and I’ll do it: your data shouldn’t be collected, kept, or sold without your say.
• Guard every dollar in the open. Push for a plain-language budget and a public spending dashboard, so any resident can see where their money goes and root out the waste that lets anyone justify cutting to the bone.
• Hold City Hall to its own promises. The city just pledged to review every building permit within 180 days or refund the fees. Good. Now someone has to make sure it happens. I’ll demand the public data, make sure small and local builders actually see the benefit, and write that promise into law so it outlasts any one government.

Investment, not waste. Accountability, not austerity. That’s a government worth the public’s trust.

Cool blocks. Clean air. Dollars that Deliver.

I co-authored the River Sisters plan now part of the West Area Plan because I grew up on the blocks this is about. In Denver, the neighborhoods with the least shade can run nine degrees hotter than tree-lined blocks just a couple of miles away. They’re largely the same neighborhoods breathing the dirtiest air, along the highways and the river.

That’s not an accident of nature. It’s the result of decades of decisions, and the council makes those decisions. This is bigger than trees. Cooling a neighborhood means designing the whole thing for it, from shade and clean air to safe streets, clean energy, and homes that hold up.

Here’s what I’ll fight for:

• Put shade on the budget. In Sun Valley, about 3% of the neighborhood is covered by tree canopy. In West Highland, a few miles away, it’s 18%. A tree is infrastructure. It cools a home, cuts a utility bill, cleans the air. Urban forestry is chronically underfunded, so I’ll fund it like the infrastructure it is, aim new planting at the hottest blocks first, expand the parks and cooling centers families can actually reach in a heat wave, and make shade a requirement, not an afterthought, when the city approves new development.
• Clear the air, starting where it’s been worst. Every kid in this city should be able to breathe. But Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea have absorbed generations of pollution from highways, industry, and truck traffic that other neighborhoods never had to. I’ll use the city’s land-use and permitting power to put distance between homes and heavy pollution, and push for real air monitoring where the air is worst. I’ll be straight about the limits, too. The biggest source, the interstate, is mostly a state and federal call, so there my job is to be a relentless advocate and to use every local tool the city does control.
• Finish what the river started. I co-authored the River Sisters framework, now woven into Denver’s West Area Plan. It reimagines the South Platte and our westside waterways as parks that protect us: flood protection, cool green corridors, places families can actually reach. The council approves the capital budget that turns plans into shovels. I’ll keep that promise moving.
• Make the climate dollars deliver. Denver voters created a climate fund that now tops $40 million a year, and we were only the second city in the country to do it. That fund carries a promise in writing, that at least half of it reaches the communities most harmed, and the city’s own auditor has already raised real questions about how well the spending is tracked. The council approves that budget. I’ll watchdog it: plain-language public reporting, and dollars landing first on the blocks that need them most, the way voters were promised. Leading on climate doesn’t just mean starting first. It means spending it right.
• Get around without a car. Cleaner air also means real choices about how you move. No family should have to own a car just to reach work, school, or a park. I’ll fight for safer sidewalks, the kind Denver voters already told the city to build, protected bike lanes, and complete streets, starting with the routes our kids take to school. I’ll be honest here as well: our regional transit agency isn’t run by the city, so the city’s job is to fix the streets the buses run on, build the bike and walking network we do control, and be a strong, steady voice for transit that actually shows up.

None of this is green idealism. It’s maintenance. You take care of what you intend to keep, and I intend to keep Denver.

Culture as Infrastructure.

Culture is Denver’s calling card to the world, it creates jobs, and it gives our young people a reason to stay. I know. I built one of Denver’s cultural homes, and I co-authored the River Sisters plan now woven into Denver’s West Area Plan. The job now is to make sure this city grows its own talent instead of pricing it out.

Here’s what I’ll fight for:

• Treat our cultural corridors as the infrastructure they are. Santa Fe Drive’s Chicano arts district, Welton Street’s Black cultural legacy, the Asia Center along Federal, Morrison Road in Westwood, West Colfax’s makers. These corridors already carry Denver’s identity. I’ll fight to back them with real city support and zoning that fits their character. Not a one-size-fits-all template handed down from downtown.
• Keep creative space from getting priced out. Denver helps protect affordable homes with land trusts. We should do the same for the studios, venues, and workshops that make a neighborhood worth visiting. I’ll push to build a cultural-space land trust, using the council’s budget and land-use tools, so artists and makers aren’t the next ones displaced.
• Grow our own talent. Expand the city’s support for youth arts and weave creative skills into workforce pathways, so a kid from any block can build a creative career here at home.
• Back the small creative businesses that are the soul of our blocks. Strengthen the city’s arts funding for the venues and cultural entrepreneurs who are both an economic engine and a gathering place. I will be a relentless advocate for the regional cultural funding our scene depends on.
• Make Denver a cultural gateway to the hemisphere. Invest in the culture that draws the world to Denver and roots our own community in it.

When we invest in our culture, we invest in our economy, our young people, and our soul. That’s a Denver worth building.