Candidate for
Council Member; City of Galt

Vision:

To have a safe, family friendly, community with good schools, safe neighborhoods, safe parks and tree lined walkable streets that provide our children safe routes to schools. To be economically viable, where Galt has a jobs to housing ratio allowing people to live and walk to work if they want to.

My top priorities:

• Infrastructure, specifically our waste water treatment plant and then our overpasses. In order to attract business and generate sales tax we must have services in place, ready to go, when a business investigates opening in our city, they want to move fast. Again, I must point out that regulatory permit issues are the responsibility of citizen's already living in our city. Neither developers nor growth caused regulatory permit changes that require us to upgrade a plant that is only 14 years old and built to the best technology at the time it was constructed in 1992. Any plant expansions, including new regulatory requirements, will be paid for by developers, as we have always required.

• General Plan. Draft policy and environmental documents are still about a year away from completion and then at some point may very well be litigated. If litigated, estimates I have received are a potential 3 to 5 years added to the process. Until our General Plan is completed we can not expand city services, update our City's planning documents and will be extremely impacted by fee's we must charge any new business wishing to locate in our City (3 to 5 times more than San Jose, as an example). In addition, if we do not start preliminary conceptual design for a waste water treatment plant expansion within the next 3 years, at some point we face a complete halt on any building. If that happens, it will severely impact infrastructure funding and our sales tax (economic development).

• Economic Development. The most up-to-date information I could find was from 2003 and it put Galt at #414 in sales tax of the 477 cities in California. Data showed that we receive an average of $42 per person, per year in sales tax. To put this in perspective, Isleton (#207) receives $142 per person, per year, Elk Grove $142 & Lodi $143. Bottom line, if we are ever to close the gap we have in police services we must raise our sales tax level by attracting retail/commercial business to our city. Cities attract businesses by having infrastructure and planning already in place, ready to go when they call.