Public Works and Jobs / Cooperative Economy

Through more public employment, infrastructure, city sponsored or cooperative business development, we need the means for bottom-up community control of the economy.

Reduce Waste and Increase Access

To get more and spend less, we need planning and programs for production, sharing, and reusing to reduce trash, cut city expenses, and save household budgets.

End Political Monopoly

To thrive we need to break out of centuries of citywide oligarchy: with election and voting reform, opening city budgeting to public participation, and delegating to neighborhoods we can empower directly or with better representation.

I’m an educated millennial who, like millions of others, has been failed by a system that needs a change in the direction of community and sustainability. I am a lifelong resident of Albany who has spent the first half of my life enraged by the blight and injustice around me, and the next half spent figuring out what to do about it.

3rd Ward

The Ward is an in-between area. Nothing except the most hyperlocal activity is located here. 15 years ago this ward was the poster child of blight, since that time tools like the land bank and many efforts from nonprofits and socially minded business owners. We need a strategy for building out of poverty and blight. We can focus on making these points as developed as possible, the chapman center, the churches, the lot gardens to serve those who are here create a sustainable neighborhood; or we focus on developing the spaces that cause the ward to fit and connect into the city better, otherwise we are a place to be avoided, past through feeling that despite the progress, the ills of our society collect here and regardless of any small investments in ourselves the larger system sees us as a sacrifice zone.

My Politics

The System places us against each other as competitors, owner’s vs renters, public workers vs small business owners, poor vs less poor, retired vs young, progressive vs conservative. The usual way the diversity of our lives and the conflicts that result is solved with monopoly; on property, the party in government, the voices in the room, the same five people managing projects. We need to be collaborators and that means changing the rules of the game. In Ward 3 we are all workers. I am running in solidary with all here and the rest of the city. I aim to change the dynamic of distrust and deceit with community ownership, responsibility, and resources. We can do a lot here. We can be more than a pass through neighborhood.