Some activated citizens at last night’s candidate forum suggested I share my opening comments here:

What do we, as citizens, want from our city government?

Police to get to our house before the burglars get away with the silver.
Firefighters to arrive before the house burns down.
Traffic to flow. Streets plowed.
Affordable, reliable, and clean power and water.
Parks with green grass and unlocked restrooms.
Safe, attractive neighborhoods.
And clean air.

These are our issues. And there are good people working on each of these. I support you and applaud you for that. And I’d like to make your job easier, not harder.

The 1950s-era philosophies of this city council have made every one of these problems worse, not better. We’re scrambling just to slow them down. I’m here to tell you we can not only stop the decline, we can get on a path to improvement.

To really fix them we need a forward-thinking, big-picture perspective. All these challenges have one common denominator: never-ending city expansion makes them harder to overcome. Subsidized city expansion both starves them of the resources needed to tackle them, and accelerates the growth of the problems.

I offer us hope for a bright future.

We can have true prosperity and enhance our quality of life if we can just get over our obsession with growth. Our growth addiction is sucking up resources and creating expenses faster than revenue. We should be investing those resources in our community instead of wasting them subsidizing the growth industry.

Think about it: For nearly 20 years we’ve been getting a negative return on our investment in growth subsidies. If that were a stock we’d have dumped it long ago.

We’ve proven it to ourselves: Expansion and population growth no longer create community prosperity. That was last century. Now we have entered the century of sustainability.

The healthy community of the 21^st century is one that is willing to leave the old paradigms behind, stop focusing on stealing prosperity from other cities, and instead invest in ourselves - our community assets, our locally owned businesses, and our citizens.