A question for All candidates.

Lago Vista faces significant challenges over the next five years, with our aging utility infrastructure being my #1 priority. We have also experienced staff turnover, including at the City Manager level, creating challenges for continuity, accountability, and longterm planning. I bring decades of professional experience in water treatment, utility infrastructure, construction, and managing multimillion dollar budgets. I believe that experience allows me to contribute directly to addressing some of our City's most pressing challenges. My goal is not to serve indefinitely. It is to help leave Lago Vista in a better position than I found it. When our infrastructure is on a sustainable path, our finances are responsibly managed, and we have stable, experienced leadership at both the City Manager and City Council levels, I will consider my service a success.

Written by the candidate

My why is service. It has been a lifelong commitment. My father, who served in the United States Army, instilled in me from a young age that we have a responsibility to serve our country and the people in it. When I was 18, I participated in a youth mission trip through St. Ann’s Catholic Church. That experience changed how I saw the world and strengthened my desire to spend my life helping others. Those lessons have guided my work in public service, nonprofit leadership, health care, real estate, and community service. Each chapter has taught me to listen, lead, solve problems, take responsibility, and follow through. I am running because I believe local government should serve the people. Local officials are the closest to the residents they represent and should also be among the most accessible and accountable. Residents deserve clear, transparent information and a meaningful opportunity to be heard before important decisions are made. I have heard from residents who want clearer explanations about how and why decisions affecting their neighborhoods, livelihoods, and tax dollars are made. I want to help strengthen trust, improve working relationships between Council and staff, and keep the City focused on the priorities that matter most to residents. I will listen, research the issues, verify the facts, respectfully ask hard questions, and consider different viewpoints before making decisions. I will approach each issue fairly and without a predetermined conclusion. My responsibility would be to represent all of Lago Vista and make decisions based on what best serves our entire community. Serving on City Council would be another way for me to continue serving others. I am running for Lago Vista, for my neighbors and friends, and to earn the trust of its residents. That trust would never be something I take lightly. My why is simple. I want residents to know their voices matter and that they have a council member who will listen, explain decisions, follow through, and work for the future of our entire community.

Written by the candidate

My “why” is helping stabilize Lago Vista and prepare us for what comes next. That comes in part from my experience before I ever sat on Council. I've worked with communities going through some of the same pressures we're experiencing now, and I saw what can happen when cities don't look far enough ahead. Difficult choices get harder. Services can be reduced. Taxes can rise substantially just to keep up. And the longer you wait, the fewer choices you have. I want Lago Vista to have choices. We're far from the difficult outcomes I've seen elsewhere, but we are at an important point. We've grown quickly without the commercial tax base many growing cities have to help carry the load. We're repairing aging infrastructure while planning for much larger projects. We're working to get our financial information current, and residents are understandably concerned about changes in staff and City leadership. You'll see in my other answers that I talk about infrastructure, financial planning and better information for our residents. All of that comes back to something pretty simple about how I approach this job: I tend to look around the corner. Right now, some of what is around that corner is already here. So looking ahead isn't about predicting the next problem. It's about dealing with what needs attention today while putting the pieces in place so we're not solving the same problems five years from now. It's also why I think about stability differently. People will change. Good information, sound processes, institutional knowledge and a credible longrange plan should remain. I don't have to be the engineer in the room, and I shouldn't pretend to be. My responsibility is to make sure we have the right engineer, the right financial information, our staff's knowledge and outside expertise when we need it. Then I need to ask questions, challenge assumptions and understand what today's decision means five, ten and twenty years from now. And through all of this, we have to protect the basics our residents depend on, police, streets, parks, our library and the everyday services people expect their City to provide. For me, stabilizing Lago Vista means getting through the challenges in front of us while building a City that doesn't depend on any one person sitting in any one chair. It means leaving behind the information, planning and systems that help the people who come after us make good decisions too. That's my why.

Written by the candidate

We recently were left in a position with no city manager, no director of development, no parks director, and several other key roles. The further we dig ourselves into this hole, the harder it will be to gather the people who have the qualifications we desire and require. My goal is to build bridges where we constantly have communication breakdown, create workflows where we constantly fly by the seat of our pants, design operating procedures so that we stop reinventing the wheel every two months when we lose a key figure, and lastly, I will call it like it is, so we can stop gaslighting our constituents and directing the blame anywhere other than to those that hold the power to do something about it.

Written by the candidate