Fund basics first and refocus Council’s top priorities.
My Values
Respect for Residents and Taxpayers: In my day job, I work to ensure value for taxpayers in British Columbia through responsible and thoughtful procurement of goods and services for our residents. If city spending and taxation isn't carefully managed and supervised, the cost to deliver the services we need will grow, debt-servicing costs will spiral, and the infrastructure deficit in our community will balloon.
I want Council to deliver clear, transparent, and accountable information to our residents. We need to re-establish trust, so that value is delivered. This means that we can continue to grow our economy, improve our city infrastructure, and provide the necessary services that people need, all in a way that respects our residents.
Actions, not Visions: Kelowna staff produce comprehensive plans to improve our official community plan, transportation network, urban forest, and more. Oftentimes, council shelves them at budget time and the actions often aren’t completed. We must ensure that plans are focused on municipal-level issues and that the actions can be implemented in a realistic budget and timeframe.
I want Council to deliver clear, transparent, and accountable information to our residents. We need to re-establish trust, so that value is delivered. This means that we can continue to grow our economy, improve our city infrastructure, and provide the necessary services that people need, all in a way that respects our residents.
Actions, not Visions: Kelowna staff produce comprehensive plans to improve our official community plan, transportation network, urban forest, and more. Oftentimes, council shelves them at budget time and the actions often aren’t completed. We must ensure that plans are focused on municipal-level issues and that the actions can be implemented in a realistic budget and timeframe.
Changes I support
- Establishing inflation-adjusted P1, P2, P3 budgeting for City departments, which would hold current service levels at P1, and require justifications for increased spending, in order to improve efficiency at City Hall.
- Establish an office for Economics, Internal Audit, and Data Visualization, allowing the City to work on zoning, regulation, budget, and tax reforms while focusing on their tax efficiency and private-sector underemployment reduction potential, along with communication of those efforts, in order to improve fiscal transparency.
- Improve contract transparency by publishing all major contracts and procurement decisions online in an easily searchable format.
- Demonstrate lifecycle costing, which would mean that major capital projects would publish net lifecycle cost estimates which include revenue, maintenance and operation, as part of the approval process.
- Increasing use of the AI Analytics team, while reducing permitting complexity, in order to automate certain rote tasks.
- Consumption-based water billing. I will work to reduce unavoidable fixed charges on our water bills. In a drought, water bills should be based almost entirely on how much water you use, not on system connection fees. It is my opinion that all water districts should be unified under the City of Kelowna umbrella.
- Supporting an independent review of taxation and permitting fees. When fees for a simple carriage home go from $2,500 to $23,000, we have a problem.
- Lobbying the provincial government to allow land millage property tax reform, bonded infrastructure funding models to reduce upfront costs of new infrastructure projects, alternative financing and funding mechanisms for road network improvements and other measures to lower taxes and for median homeowners and renters.
