A lot of the coverage of my campaign is about one thing. I get it. It is a big thing. But if you elect someone to the Clearwater City Council on a single-issue pitch, you get a single-issue council member. I have never wanted to be that, and I was not that when the voters sent me the first time.
So here is what the rest of the job looked like for me, and what it would look like for me again if I win on August 18.
ADUs — the policy change I am proudest of
Early in my term I led a change to the city charter to legalize Accessory Dwelling Units across Clearwater. Tiny homes. Garage apartments. Granny flats. The buildings that used to be normal in American neighborhoods until postwar zoning rules pretended they were somehow a threat.
This was not glamorous work. It was a land-use code rewrite. But the economic math on it is straightforward:
- For homeowners: A legal ADU on your property is a rental unit you can live off of. For seniors on fixed income, that is the difference between aging in place and being priced out of your own house.
- For renters: Every new ADU is a unit that did not exist before, at price points below what developers build. The cost of a garage conversion is less than a new apartment building, and the rent follows.
- For the city: ADUs fit inside existing neighborhoods without forcing high-density redevelopment. They grow housing supply without changing the character of the places people love.
We did this. The new units are going in. That is a real thing I can point to.
What I would do next
A "Habitat for Humanity" for small businesses
Habitat builds houses at cost for families who put in sweat equity. I have been pitching a parallel idea for small businesses — a program where the city helps cover build-out on a storefront in exchange for commitments to keep the space open as a neighborhood-serving business for a set number of years. We have empty downtown storefronts. We have people who would open bakeries, repair shops, studios, restaurants if they could afford the first six months. We can connect those two facts.
Keep ADUs expanding
The first round of ADU reform worked. The natural next step is reducing friction on permitting, and considering whether short-term rental rules should be adjusted so that ADUs go into the long-term rental pool rather than the vacation-rental pool. That is a balance, and it is worth having in public.
Neighborhood infrastructure in every part of the city
Not just downtown. Sidewalks, lighting, drainage, internet. North Greenwood, East Clearwater, the whole north-of-Gulf-to-Bay corridor. When I served on the Downtown Development Board and helped secure funding for the Merchants Association, I learned that the pattern for making a district come alive is not complicated. It is just expensive, and it has to be done deliberately, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Water — because nobody else is running on this
During my term the council voted to shut down two water treatment plants that would have been underwater in a Category 5 storm, and moved that treatment to a new facility outside the flood zone. That is not a glamorous vote. Nobody is going to make a yard sign out of "resilient water infrastructure." But without that vote, the next bad hurricane season is a citywide crisis, not a weekend inconvenience.
Projects like these are why local government matters. They are also why single-issue candidates are not the right answer for Clearwater, even when the single issue is as big as the one that is famous here.
So: why me
I am the candidate in this race with the thirty-year record on the issue everyone is watching, AND the four-year record of doing the rest of the job. Those two things are supposed to be in tension. They are not. They are the same job.
On August 18, I would like the chance to prove that again.