Thank you for raising this. It is an important question to answer.

I was elected to council in 2017 and resigned in 2019 after our Congressman called me personally and asked me to serve. I did not plan to leave council; I was not job hunting; I did not seek out open applications on his - or any other - website. I remember exactly where I was when he called.

I believe Representative Neguse is one of the most talented and consequential public servants Colorado has ever had. The role with him felt like a calling, so I shut down a successful real estate business and resigned from City Council to answer that call.

What few people remember is that there was precedent for my choice. Mayor Shaun McGrath resigned from Council in 2009 to take a role in the Obama administration, and the city accepted the resignation without controversy.

I was in the minority on Council at the time, and I calculated that I could better serve Boulder by helping build a congressional office than by casting losing votes. I'm not asking anyone to agree with that calculation, but I know that I made it in good faith.

While serving with Representative Neguse, I built a constituent outreach program that won awards and deeply engaged the community, and I supported him and this community through the longest federal government shutdown at the time, an impeachment in which he served as a manager, the COVID response, and the King Soopers shooting. I also learned from the best.

Knowing what I know now about how the resignation landed for the people who elected me (even though I believed at the time I was continuing to serve them), I would not make that choice the same way.

I was one of those people who was activated to run for office after Trump won and was caging kids. But I’m not 35 anymore. I'll be 45 next month. The reasons that pulled me out of the seat in 2019 – the urgency of the moment, a call to help build something at the national level under a leader I believed in – are not the reasons I’m running now. I'm running because the work I want to do is here, in Boulder, on the issues I’ve spent the years studying, writing about, and engaging with publicly.

Former Councilman Mark Wallach texted me this morning to remind me that I am the only reason he was even in office. My vacancy opened a 6th seat, and he came in 6th in the election. Even though Mark and I have disagreements, I am glad that Boulder got him instead of me. I was far less thoughtful back then, and far more easily swayed by interest groups. Mark was one of the most thoughtful council members we have ever had, and he was not beholden to interest groups.

I encourage anyone who has questions about me to read my website (the home page, especially).

My platform is not based on the values of one side or another. It is based on two decades of continuous engagement in this community, my deep experience in housing and land use, and four years of studying Boulder at the University of Colorado. My thesis is the most extensive single document we have on the history of Boulder's land use and economic development. It will outlive me, and I am proud of that. If you walk through the history with me, you can see exactly why I have landed on the platform I have.