Emphasis on Comprehensive Planning 

I hope to take a more comprehensive approach to town planning as opposed to an itemized approach. Sure it’s great if you have sidewalks throughout town. It’s great to have lots of greenspace and buffering too. I’m also a strong advocate of storm water retention and detention measures that help protect our streams and waterways. However, when you combine all these elements together, are we being counterproductive on issues such as affordable housing, reducing dependence on the automobile, and discouraging urban sprawl?

We need to look at all these issues together. Sure it’s going to be tough: decision making will require looking at each item in depth and then seeing how these items interact. Discussions may seem tedious and abstruse and people will become frustrated with perhaps the slow progress. But in the end, I think we will create better and more effective solutions. Solutions that consider all points of view. Not everyone will get their way--there is going to be compromise and give-and-take. But hopefully, in the end, we are going to have a town where people can walk around easier, where traffic isn’t horrific, where we can have parks that people can enjoy and vistas that people can admire, where we have housing options available for all our residents, where small businesses feel they have a viable chance, and where students can still be students without disturbing the rest of the town.

I believe there is hope for Boone’s future.