Experience. Heart. Real Solutions for Our Community.
Homes families can afford, child care parents can count on, well-maintained streets and parks, and a city that just works. Put me to work, Salt Lake.
Allow me to reintroduce myself
My wife Amy likes to say that when I was Salt Lake County Mayor, I whistled on my way to work. She's right. I love public service, and I first ran for office because I loved helping shape the future of our community and wanted to make a difference.
As County Mayor from 2005 to 2013, I worked to make our government deliver for people. We added child care to our county recreation centers, so working parents had one less thing to juggle. We partnered with the state and Salt Lake City on an approach to homelessness that helped Utah cut chronic homelessness by 72%. And when the 2008 financial crisis hit, an independent bond-rating agency told us ours was the best-run government they had seen in a crisis.
Now I'm running for Mayor of Salt Lake City because the community where Amy and I raised our children has become out of reach financially for individuals and families hoping to do the same.
When Amy and I were looking for child care, she almost couldn't go back to a job she loved. More than twenty years later, families are hitting the same wall, and a first home has moved even further out of reach, with a median price of $675,000. We can see it when our schools close and enrollment has dropped 24% in a decade and is projected to keep falling. A city whose families can't afford to stay in is a city that's losing its future.
I know how to change that, because I've spent my career doing this work. For 30 years, my brother, wife and I have run a small business building and renovating housing in Salt Lake City. We started with one small apartment building, where I spent nights and weekends scrubbing toilets, patching leaks and pulling up decades-old carpet. I started a nonprofit to build affordable housing, and I served as President of Habitat for Humanity of Salt Lake. I'm trained as a civil engineer and a lawyer, and I've taught finance, so I understand roads and pipes, codes and budgets.
As your mayor, I'll:
Go all-in on affordable homeownership, the surest path to stable neighborhoods and to the kind of wealth families can retire on.
Expand child care and after-school programs, so parents don't have to choose between their careers and their kids.
Balance the scales. If we can find public dollars to expand a billionaire's sports arena, we can support the nonprofits building child care centers, improving our neighborhoods and providing services to our homeless community
Treat the Great Salt Lake like the crisis it is, with sustained conservation from the mountaintops to our park strips.
Execute with excellence. City services should be something people can count on. That means no shutting off small businesses' water without notice, and no road projects that drag on for years.
Support Small Businesses and Nonprofits. We need to support those who support us. Small businesses drive our economy and nonprofits serve those who need a helping hand.
Salt Lake City has given my family so much. I'm running so the next generation of families can build their lives here too.
