A strong economy built on competitiveness and job creation.
My Values
You can't have good public-sector services without a strong private sector economy. We need to make sure that both new and established businesses can thrive by finding affordable places to operate and attracting the talent they need to serve our community. We can maintain our competitive advantage in quality of life with better community planning, but we need to make Kelowna a more affordable place to both live and run a business.
While there are issues council cannot directly control, like hospital staffing, it is crucial that city council recognizes the problems it can solve and does something to solve them. We can work with SD23 to designate school sites. We can attract more high-wage employers, legalize low-cost business spaces for entrepreneurs, and help families find child care by ensuring enough spaces exist through proper development planning.
While there are issues council cannot directly control, like hospital staffing, it is crucial that city council recognizes the problems it can solve and does something to solve them. We can work with SD23 to designate school sites. We can attract more high-wage employers, legalize low-cost business spaces for entrepreneurs, and help families find child care by ensuring enough spaces exist through proper development planning.
Changes I support
- Competitive permitting for businesses and events. Kelowna should be the easiest and most cost-effective municipality in BCto operate a business or run an event.
- Small business roundtable for permitting reform and regulatory efficiency review for both events and businesses. The current approach of "leading with no" instead of "getting to yes", while strangling community events in increased costs, is directly forcing taxpayers to spend more on unnecessary bureaucracy.
- 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 job creation, along with communication of those efforts, in order to improve fiscal transparency and efficiency.
- Improving safety and cleanliness in all urban centers by redirecting parking meter revenue towards security and downtown-on-call teams through "parking benefit districts".
- Directing staff to prepare an industrial land strategy with 5% vacancy rate goals achieved by 2030.
- Designating a permanent year-round indoor market site for independent vendors, similar to Toronto's St. Lawrence Market.
- Creating hospital-oriented OCP amendments for the Pandosy - Richter transit corridors including options for short-term healthcare accommodation for nurses and patients.
- Directing staff to report on a walkable commercial and mixed-use zoning reform strategy, in order to create allow new "high street" commercial clusters similar to Bernard and Pandosy streets.
- Moving a motion at the council table to legalize and incentivize more childcare spaces through childcare major prezoning in core area neighborhoods.
- Directing staff to work with the provincial government on reintroducing split-rate property tax reform, with the end goal of revenue-neutral single-rate land value tax shifts.
