Here is Colorado Springs’ 2009 Strategic Plan.

Page 6 lists the Strategic Prioritized Goals:

1. City Services - interestingly the current language here does not focus on delivering the vital services citizens want, need and expect from their municipal government. I would change that. We need to get the basics right and cover those under our city budget. As you city councilor I’ll champion community efforts to protect or enhance our quality of life, but I will not support taxing local citizens and businesses to fund programs that benefit just a few millionaires (see Economic Development).

2. Sustainable Growth - the language here implies it’s a high priority to encourage growth that lessens sprawl and makes maximum, efficient use of existing infrastructure. For some reason the current City Council and city staff appear instead to interpret this goal to mean we want to encourage growth, and we want to do everything possible to stay in that mode as long as possible. They define “sustain” as “keep it up.” The best definition of sustainability is acting in a way that does not diminish the ability of future generations to have quality of life and resources equal to yours.

If the intention of “sustainable growth” as a goal is to put a green tint on the way we sprawl, we are not even flirting with success in this modest goal. The City’s ideas for this goal are chock full of incentives for development. Incentives cost the city, and we don’t need incentives. What we need are disincentives for the highest-impact development. I will push for public policies that aggressively and fully assess all growth for its true costs. By doing this, low-impact growth will naturally be less expensive to undertake. Where and if we must grow, the least destructive forms of growth will naturally become preferred over more destructive forms - which are less expensive today for developers only because so many of the costs are externalized and borne by all of us in the community.

Growth is not sustainable. Our city and Council are behaving as though it is a strategic imperative to expand the city. It is not. I will work hard to eliminate “growth” as a goal. And I will work to rename this goal in the Strategic Plan “sustainability.”

3. Economic Vitality - this language indicates the city has a goal of growing the city tax base, will support efforts to attract, retain and create jobs, and wants “thriving” neighborhoods. The language in this goal indicates a strong growth bias, a belief that growth results in economic vitality and that growth is necessary for such vitality. Yet all evidence is to the contrary. The era of growth as a prosperity engine is clearly over.

Growing the city tax base should only be necessary if we keep expanding the city. So this goal puts us into a vicious circle: we grow the city to expand the tax base, then we need even more tax base because - this is true across the country - new subdivisions don’t provide enough tax revenue to fully fund serving them. So we grow the city some more, but that just increases the imbalance between revenues and costs to serve. And here we are, in a perpetual cycle, always thinking the next increment of growth will provide the tax base bonanza we need. Growing the tax base has not solved any problems for our city. The expenses rise faster than the tax revenue.

Because “vitality” can be subject to misinterpretation, I propose we rename this one, “healthy local economy.” A healthy local economy is not a desperate growth Ponzi scheme, where it’s hoped each batch of new residents will provide enough revenue to make up for the costs of the last batch. We will instead focus our energy on localizing our economy, enhancing our community’s efficiency, taking good care of the local businesses we have.

The healthy, vital community of the 21st century is not one that is perpetually expanding. It is a community in which citizens’ needs are met. Children are safe, well-educated, and have green parks in which to play. Local businesses thrive because they are supported by their community. Their pockets aren’t picked through “economic development” taxes or utility bills that unfairly fund incentives for a handful of out of town businesses. The modern, healthy community improves by becoming more efficient, reducing costs and waste, plugging leaks in the local economy rather than constantly raiding other towns for their employers and workers.

I will make every effort to help City Council members, city staff, and the public to understand that our city government should not be in the “job creation” business. Job attraction in most cases does not help local unemployed citizens gain jobs. It actually increases the number of unemployed in our community. This is explained further in the Healthy Local Economy section of my platform.

“Retail enhancement” should not be a city activity. Making real estate deals for commercial developers more lucrative does not increase city tax revenue. Citizens only have so much money with which to shop. Having more stores does not make us shop more. Enticing retailers to make location decisions based on incentives rather than sound market factors is a recipe for a never-ending cycle of empty shopping centers followed by subsidies followed by empty shopping centers.

The Colorado Springs Economic Development Corporation should not be the beneficiary of any City, Utilities, or Memorial Hospital funding. Read more about the EDC and why we must stop financing its narrow agenda here, and read more about my plan for modern, enlightened, 21st century economic development for our community here.

Housing and Building Association: The HBA is listed as an important city partner in this goal. Are you kidding me? This is clear evidence of the prehistoric approach our city takes to economic vitality. This approach assumes the more houses built, the better off our local economy. We proved this is not the case during the building boom of the 1990s and first half of this decade.

Of course, our City and Utility have an incestuous relationship with the HBA. The HBA and its individual members are consistently the biggest funders of City Council campaigns. The HBA has insinuated itself deep into the workings of our City and Utility - to the point where staff won’t bring forward a proposal without prior HBA approval. I will work tirelessly to loosen the HBA’s grip on our City and utility. We need to move both organizations from a culture of growth to a culture of sustainability.

4. Quality of Life - you might get a kick out of the mumbo jumbo here. Maybe it would be easier for our elected officials and city staff to hit the target on our quality of life wants and needs if we were to simplify this. Perhaps this goal should be: Endeavor to protect and preserve the quality of life our citizens treasure, not trading it away in exchange for a growing tax base.

5. Civic Engagement - I’d recommend putting citizens first in this goal. I suspect non-profits are listed first because the Housing and Building Association and the Economic Development Corporation are technically non-profits, and they pull most of the strings in this town. Together, you and I are going to change that. Currently our city and utility make it very difficult for citizens to be fully informed about issues that impact them every month. The average citizen doesn’t have time to search for the truth behind the spin, to file open records requests and ferret out the well-hidden truths. I have spent countless hours documenting the spin and trying to dig up the truth.

The big truth is the millionaire growth profiteers who pull the strings in our town don’t want you to be engaged. Their business model, which thrives on public subsidies of their business, requires that you remain uninvolved and uninformed, where you’re more likely to buy the spin. True civic engagement would result in a massive public outcry for reform. Deception and poor public policy cannot withstand the daylight of informed public scrutiny.

I will champion reforms in our public communication process, insisting we change the culture from one of spin to one of complete disclosure. I will champion and demonstrate respecting, encouraging and thanking citizens who get involved, with special respect for those who dare to bring alternative views to our attention.