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.

I’ve learned a lot since my first term on Council, especially from working for Joe Neguse. Joe listens before deciding. I watched him spend months bringing stakeholders together before proposing legislation, and I helped design his outreach program. I would bring that same commitment to Council through regular office hours, town halls, and earlier community involvement.

Here are some specific changes I would work toward:

• Bring people in before plans take shape. Restore process committees to help design engagement on major decisions, involving residents, people directly affected, and those with relevant expertise. Start by defining the problem and exploring options, then explain how public input shaped the outcome, including why some suggestions weren’t adopted.

• Strengthen financial oversight. Establish an independent Performance Auditor reporting to Council and a Capital Improvement Advisory Council with relevant community expertise to scrutinize project costs, priorities, and progress.

• Require regular check-ins. Major projects should return to Council at key milestones, with public updates on budgets, schedules, and changes in scope. I believe more rigorous checkpoints could have helped Council catch and address problems at Alpine-Balsam earlier. Housing policies also need scheduled reviews: Are they producing the outcomes we intended? If not, what should we change? The Hill is a great example of this right now. I think we need to check back in on some of our policies and recalibrate. 

• Take Council’s oversight responsibilities seriously. Strengthen evaluations of the city manager, city attorney, and municipal judge, with clear expectations, meaningful feedback, and follow-up appropriate to each role and respectful of judicial independence.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with every decision I make. But I want people to know I heard them, understand why I voted the way I did, and see that I’m willing to change course when something isn’t working. That’s how I believe we begin to earn back trust.

1. Take care of what we already have first. Boulder’s first discretionary dollar should go toward maintaining the buildings, streets, and corridors we already own before we add new facilities or expand at the edges.

   Every new asset creates a maintenance obligation that lasts for decades. Boulder’s Facilities Master Plan covers 75 buildings totaling 1.8 million square feet, with a replacement value of more than $550 million. One of its two guiding priorities is consolidating city uses.

   Buildings the city no longer needs should be leased, sold, or repurposed for housing, small-business space, or other community uses. The proceeds could help maintain the facilities we keep or pay down debt on underfunded buildings.

   Area III is the one place where this principle may get more complicated, but only if Council decides to make middle-income family housing there a real priority. Producing the kinds of homes and prices those families need would require a serious public commitment. More on that below.

2. Show stewardship before asking residents for more. This entire framework depends on public trust. And trust is not something the city can keep spending without earning it back.

   Boulder voters have been extraordinarily generous, approving tax measure after tax measure in good faith. The city should regularly show residents what they received in return.

   I support creating an independent performance auditor reporting directly to City Council to evaluate whether city programs and spending are delivering the results residents were promised. We need to know what is working, where costs are growing, and what needs to change. Findings should be public, with clear timelines for addressing recommendations and regular follow-up.

   I also support establishing a Capital Improvement Advisory Council that brings residents and people with relevant financial, construction, and infrastructure experience into the process of evaluating major capital investments. It would help assess maintenance needs, scrutinize cost estimates and alternatives, and recommend priorities before the city commits to major projects or asks voters to approve more borrowing. Residents should be able to see what a project will cost to build, operate, and maintain.

Historic buildings and places give Boulder a sense of identity and continuity. They help us understand how the city developed, who lived and worked here, and what earlier generations valued. They also give us places to feel attached to. It is part of why people so deeply mourn the loss of longtime businesses and gathering places. These are where so many formative memories are made. I think of the song, “make new friends, but keep the old, some are silver and the other gold.” Our new places and spaces are silver, and our historic places and spaces are gold.

Researching 150 years of Boulder’s housing history for my graduate work deepened my appreciation for those connections. What drew me to geography was how it brings together space, place, and time, and our relationship to all three. A building can tell us something about how people lived, but also about who had the opportunity to live there and how that changed over time. Boulder’s history is deeply meaningful to me after the work I just completed. I also have so much love and gratitude for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program, and local historians such as Sylvia Pettem, Lyn Perrigo, Dan Corson, and Peter Pollock.

My work also reinforced that our history is complicated. Preservation can help us tell a fuller story, including the experiences and contributions of women, Black and Indigenous residents and other people of color, workers, renters, and others whose stories have too often been overlooked. Modest homes, workplaces and community gathering spaces deserve attention alongside prominent buildings and well-known residents. I think these places are best preserved when they remain part of everyday life. Keeping an older building occupied by a local business, adapting a home for another generation, or making a historic gathering place more accessible allows people to keep building connections to it. That is a large part of what makes Boulder feel like home.