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Dear Neighbor,
It has been an honor to serve both as your current Mayor and on the City Council for the past four years. I’m proud of what our city has accomplished and of my part in helping make Sausalito better. We’ve accomplished a lot and have laid a great foundation for a bright future. But there is much more to do and big challenges lie ahead.
Last week, I filed papers with the City Clerk to run for another term of office. In my upcoming campaign, which gears up in September, I look forward to hearing your opinions on how Sausalito is doing and on what needs to be done to make it the best it can be.
During the past four years we have completely rebuilt our city government with a new City Manager and new heads of almost every department. We have a new labor contract that decreases wasteful cost and helps retain the institutional memory lost as the result of staff turnover. We humanely dealt with a homeless camp crisis.
We have invested our money smarter and we have earned more than a million extra dollars as a result. We put budget surpluses into a pension trust fund. We have substantial cash reserves and savings for a rainy day. We increased the number of Parks and Rec activities, encouraged the Arts, held a great Boat Show in the Marinship, and extended Jazz by the Bay into the great weather of September.
This fall we will see the downtown improved as the result of the $2.4 million federal grant that funded Ferry Landside Improvements. We formed a Business Improvement District for the purpose of filling empty storefronts and driving more tax revenue into city coffers.
We still have challenges and we can solve them. We ended the last fiscal year with another budget surplus, but we may face a deficit in the coming year primarily due to much higher insurance costs. So, as always, we need to be both tactically and strategically careful in our spending.
Increasing city revenue, without raising taxes, is a key to funding a revitalization of our infrastructure. To do this we need a multi-year plan for generating large and sustained budget surpluses. The thing is, these kinds of surpluses don’t come from cutting costs. They come from policy decisions that promote economic growth. With more economic activity, we will increase tax revenue without raising taxes. Additional revenues can be spent on our infrastructure, on our seniors, our kids and our quality of life.
An optimistic, can-do mindset is needed to make all this happen. This is the attitude I bring to life and what I try to bring to the City Council. I am an experienced business person whose business perspective adds to the collective wisdom of my colleagues on the Council. That's why I have been endorsed by seven former Sausalito Mayors and the last three Marin County Supervisors from the district representing Sausalito.
If you believe in what I’ve done and in what I can do, please support my re-election campaign by clicking below. I look forward to engaging with you during the coming weeks. And I thank you for your support.
Have a great August!
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