Our community can be alive with positive energy and spirit if we can get excited about what matters to most of us. I want to help our community embrace quality of life instead of the dollar. We have many pockets of community spirit alive and well today. Unfortunately too many of those pockets have to spend all their time and energy trying to minimize the negative impacts of an ever-expanding city. We don’t have much time left on our hands to work on improving our community. We have to settle for not losing too much ground too fast.

I believe we can regain the community spirit and pride we’ve lost as we’ve grown, if we can get energized around matters of the heart rather than matters of who gets to be a millionaire. This means we embrace equality, diversity, inclusion and tolerance. And we do it because it’s the right thing to do, not just because we discovered it will help us attract more businesses and population.

Our city’s obsession with expansion and population growth distract us from concentrating on the areas of growth that will increase our happiness and improve our quality of life: learning, laughing and loving. Our growth addiction diverts precious resources we could be investing in our community. Instead of taking good care of City Auditorium, our community centers and our longstanding neighborhoods, we pour millions of dollars into a corporate welfare program that subsidizes new real estate developments and their schemes to attract more population to drive new home sales. New home sales is not a meaningful metric for how well the everyday citizen in Colorado Springs is doing. In truth, the real impacts of new home construction are negative - on our pocketbooks, our environment, and our quality of life.

We can and will do better.

For more on equality, diversity, inclusion and tolerance, see the answers I submitted to Focus on the Family’s candidate questionnaire.